SAPPHO

SAPPHO

MEMOIR, TEXT, SELECTED
RENDERINGS AND A LITERAL
TRANSLATION BY HENRY
THORNTON WHARTON

NEW YORK

JOHN LANE COMPANY

LONDON: JOHN LANE

MCMVII.

STACK
ANNEX

?A

HOT-

PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION

I WOULD fain have enriched this edition of my
Sappho with some new words of the poetess, if
only even to the slight extent which I reached in
1887 ; but, to the world's sorrow, that pleasure
has been denied me. Still, we need not yet give
up all hope, after the unexpected discovery of
the unknown Mimiambi of Herondas, on a
papyrus-roll used to stuff an Egyptian mummy-
case, so few years ago (cf. The Academy ', Oct. 1 1 ,
1890).

Neverthless, I can now present to the lovers
of Sappho a good deal more than was heretofore
in my power ; in a new form, it is true, but with
the same beautiful Greek type. And with this
third edition I am enabled to give a reproduc-
tion, in photogravure, of the charming picture
of Mitylene by the late Mr. Clarkson Stan-
field, R.A., for which I am primarily indebted
to Dr. R. Garnett, of the British Museum.

Since it was my privilege, if I may say so
without arrogance, to introduce Sappho to

VI PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION

English readers in the year 1885, in a form
which they could understand, whether they
knew any Greek or none, and in the entirety
of every known word of hers, there has arisen
a mass of literature upon the subject of the
greatest lyrist of all time. To enumerate the
pictures that have been painted, the articles
and books and plays that have been written,
which have appealed to the public in the last
ten years, would be an almost impossible task.
In my Bibliography I have endeavoured to
give a reference to all that is of prominent and
permanent interest, ranging from ' the postman
poet,' Mr. Hosken, to the felicitous paraphrases
— some fractions of which I have taken the
liberty to quote in the text — of ' Michael Field '
in her Long Ago.

The translation of the Hymn to Aphrodite,
which was made for me by the late J. Addington
Symonds, now appears in the amended form in
which he finally printed it. Professor Palgrave
has kindly allowed me to include some versions
of his, made many years ago. The late Sir
R. F. Burton made a metrical translation of
Catullus, which has recently been published,
and I am grateful to Lady Burton for allowing
me to reprint his version of the Roman poet's
Ode to Lesbia.

The only critical edition of the text of

PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION vii

Sappho since that of Bergk — the text which I
adopt — has been made by Mr. G. S. Farnell,
headmaster of the Victoria College, Jersey ;
from which I have had considerable assistance.
As regards erudite scholarship, the investiga-
tions of Professor Luniak, of the Kazan Uni-
versity, deserve more attention than it is within
the scope of my book to give them. I reviewed
his essay in some detail in The Academy for
July 19, 1890, p. 53. The criticisms upon it
by Professor Naguiewski, in his disputation
for the doctorate two years later, go far to prove
that my appreciation of Sappho's character
cannot be easily shaken. That rapturous frag-
ment of Sophocles —

*fi Geot, rlq 5pa Kuirpig, H TU;
roG6e

(O gods, what love, what yearning, contributed
to this f) still remains to me the keynote of
what Sappho has been through all the ages.

HENRY T. WHARTON.

'MADRESFIKLD,' ACOL ROAD,

WEST HAMPSTEAD, LONDON, N.W.,
April 1895.

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION

THE cordial reception which the first edition
of my little book met with has encouraged me
to make many improvements in this re-issue.
Unforeseen delays in its production have also
helped me to advance upon my first essay.
Among other changes, I have been able to
obtain a new fount of Greek type, which has
to me a peculiar beauty. Unfamiliar though
some of the letters may appear at first sight,
they reproduce the calligraphy of the manu-
scripts of the most artistic period of the
Middle Ages. This type has been specially
cast in Berlin, by favour of the Imperial Go-
vernment. In a larger size it is not unknown
to English scholars, but such as I am now en-
abled to present has never been used before.

Last spring a telegram from the Vienna
correspondent of the Times announced that

yiii

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION IX

some new verses of Sappho had been found
among the Fayum papyri in the possession of
the Archduke Rdnier. When the paper on
his Imperial Highness' papyri was read before
the Imperial Academy of Science by Dr.
Wilhelm Ritter von Hartel on the loth of
March, it became evident that the remark was
made, not in allusion to the Archduke's pos-
sessions, but to that portion of the Fayum
manuscripts which had been acquired by the
Imperial Museum in Berlin. The verses re-
ferred to were indeed no other than the two
fragments which had been deciphered and
criticised by the celebrated scholar, Dr. F.
Blass, of Kiel, in the Rheinisches Museum for
1880 ; and further edited by Bergk in the post-
humous edition of his Poetae Lyrici Graeci. I
am now able, not only to print the text of these
fragments and a translation of them, but also,
through the courtesy of the Imperial Govern-
ment of Germany, to give an exact reproduc-
tion of photographs of the actual scraps of
parchment on which they were written a thou-
sand years ago. Dr. Erman, the Director of
the Imperial Egyptian Museum, kindly fur-
nished me with the photographs ; and the
Autotype Company has copied them with its
well-known fidelity.
Among many other additions, that which I

X PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION

have been able to make to fragment 100 is.
particularly interesting. The untimely death
of the young French scholar, M. Charles Graux,
who found the quotation among the dry dust of
Choricius' rhetorical orations, is indeed to be
deplored. Had he lived longer he might have
cleared up for us many another obscure passage
in the course of his studies of manuscripts
which have not hitherto found an editor.

The publication of the memoir on Naukratis
by the Committee of the Egypt Exploration
Fund last autumn is an event worthy of notice,
the town having been so intimately connected
with Sappho's story. On one of the pieces of
pottery found at Naucratis by Mr. Petrie occur
the inscribed letters ZA4> (pi. xxxiv., fig. 532),
which some at first thought might refer to
Sappho ; but the more probable restoration is
eijq 'A9[po6iTHv, ' to Aphrodite.'

Since the issue of my first edition, M. De
Vries has published, at Leyden, an exhaustive
dissertation upon Ovid's Epistle, Sappho to
Phaon, which has caused me to modify some of
my conclusions regarding it. Although Ovid's
authorship of this Epistle seems to me now to
be sufficiently vindicated, I still remain con-
vinced that we are not justified in taking the
statements in it as historically accurate.

It is curious also that a candidate for the

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION XI

degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Univer-
sity of Erlangen offered, as his inaugural disser-
tation, in 1885, an account of 'Sappho the
Mitylenean.' The author, Joacheim I. Pauli-
dos, is a native of Lesbos. It is a pamphlet of
sixty pages, written, not in modern, but in
classical Greek. His opening sentence, Mia nai
WOVH qivero Zan<pu> — 'Sappho stands alone and
unique,' comes near the meaning, but misses
the polish of the phrase — gives his dominant
tone; his acceptance of her character greatly
resembles mine.

Since the years now and then bring to light
some fresh verses of Sappho's, there is a faint
hope that more may still be found. The rich
store of parchments and papyri discovered in
the Fayum has not all been examined yet.
Indeed, among a few of these which were lost in
the custom-house at Alexandria in 1881-2, M.
Maspero, the renowned Director of Explora-
tions in Egypt, thought he had detected the
perfume of Sappho's art.

It is pleasing to see (cf. fragment 95) that
our own Poet Laureate has again recurred, in
his latest volume of poems, to a phrase from
Sappho which he had first used nearly sixty
years ago ; and that he calls her ' the poet,'
implying her supremacy by the absence of
any added epithet.

XII PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION

I am indebted to many kind friends and dis-
tinguished scholars for much assistance. Among
them I must especially thank Professor Blass, of
Kiel. Notwithstanding the frequent recurrence
of his name on my pages, I owe more to his
cordial help and criticism than I can acknow-
ledge here.

Little more than I have given is needed to
prove how transcendent an artist Sappho was ;
but I cannot forbear concluding with an ex-
tract from a recent essay on poetry by Mr.
Theodore Watts -Dunton :—

' Never before these songs were sung, and
never since, did the human soul, in the grip of
a fiery passion, utter a cry like hers ; and, from
the executive point of view, in directness, in
lucidity, in that high imperious verbal economy
which only Nature can teach the artist, she has
no equal, and none worthy to take the place of
second.'

HENRY T. WHARTON.

39 ST. GEORGE'S ROAD,

KILBURN, LONDON, N.W.,

April 1887.

PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION

SAPPHO, the Greek poetess whom more than
eighty generations have been obliged to hold
without a peer, has never, in the entirety of her
works, been brought within the reach of Eng-
lish readers. The key to her wondrous repu-
tation— which would, perhaps, be still greater
if it had ever been challenged — has hitherto
lain hidden in other languages than ours. As
a name, as a figure pre-eminent in literary his-
tory, she has indeed never been overlooked.
But the English-reading world has come to
think, and to be content with thinking, that no
verse of hers survives save those two hymns
which Addison, in the Spectator, has made
famous — by his panegyric, not by Ambrose
Philips' translation.

My aim in the present work is to familiarise
English readers, whether they understand Greek
or not, with every word of Sappho, by translat-
ing all the one hundred and seventy fragments

xiii

XIV PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION

that her latest German editor thinks may be
ascribed to her :

Love's priestess, mad with pain and joy of song,
Song's priestess, mad with joy and pain of love.

SWINBURNE.

I have contented myself with a literal English
prose translation, for Sappho is, perhaps above
all other poets, untranslatable. The very diffi-
culties in the way of translating her may be the
reason why no Englishman has hitherto under-
taken the task. Many of the fragments have
been more or less successfully rendered into
English verse, and such versions I have quoted
whenever they rose above mediocrity, so far as
I have been able to discover them.

After an account of Sappho's life as complete
as my materials have allowed, I have taken her
fragments in order as they stand in Bergk,
whose text I have almost invariably followed.
I have given (i) the original fragment in Greek,
(2) a literal version in English prose, distin-
guished by italic type, (3) every English metri-
cal translation that seems worthy of such
apposition, and (4) a note of the writer by
whom, and the circumstances under which,
each fragment has been preserved. Too often
a fragment is only a single word, but I have
omitted nothing.

It is curious to note how early in the history

PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION XV

of printing the literature of Sappho began. The
British Museum contains a sort of commentary
on Sappho which is dated 1475 m t^e Cata-
logue ; this is but twenty years later than the
famous ' Mazarin ' Bible, and only one year
after the first book was printed in England. It
is written in Latin by Georgius Alexandrinus
Merula, and is of much interest, apart from its
strange type and contractions of words.

The first edition of any part of Sappho was
that of the Hymn to Aphrodite, by H. Steph-
anus, in his edition of Anacreon, 8vo, 1554.
Subsequent editions of Anacreon contained
other fragments attributed to her, including
some that are now known to be by a later
hand. Fulvius Ursinus wrote some comments
on those then known in the Carmina Novem
lllustrium Feminarum published at Antwerp,
8vo, 1568. Is. Vossius gave an amended text
of the two principal odes in his edition of
Catullus, London, 4to, 1684.

But the first separate edition of Sappho's
works was that of Johann Christian Wolf,
which was published in 4to at Hamburg in
1733, and reprinted under an altered title two
years later. Wolfs work is as exhaustive as was
possible at his date. He gives a frontispiece
figuring all the then known coins bearing refer-
ence to the poetess ; a life of her — written, like

XVI* PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION

the rest of the treatise, in Latin — occupies 32
pages ; a Latin translation of all the quotations
from or references to her in the Greek classics,
and all the Latin accounts of her, together with
the annotations of most previous writers, and
copious notes by himself, in 253 pages ; and
the work is completed with elaborate indices.

The next important critical edition of Sappho
was that of Heinrich Friedrich Magnus Volger,
pp. Ixviii., 195, 8vo, Leipzig, 1810. It was
written on the old lines, and did not do much
to advance the knowledge of her fragments.
Volger added a ' musical scheme,' which seems
more curious than useful, and of which it is
hard to understand either the origin or the
intention.

But nothing written before 1816 really
grasped the Sapphic question. In that year
Welcker published his celebrated refutation of
the long-current calumnies against Sappho,
Sappho vindicated from a prevailing Prejudice.
In his zeal to establish her character he may
have been here and there led into extravagance,
but it is certain that his searching criticism first
made it possible to appreciate her true position.
Nothing that has been written since has suc-
ceeded in invalidating his main conclusions,
despite all the onslaughts of Colonel Mure and
those few who sympathised with him.

PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION xvil

Consequently the next self-standing edition
of Sappho, by Christian Friedrich Neue, pp.
106, 4to, Berlin, 1827, embodying the results
of the 'new departure,' was far in advance of
its predecessors — not in cumbrous elaboration,
but in critical excellence. Neue's life of the
poetess was written in the light of Welcker's
researches ; his purification of the text was due
to more accurate study of the ancient manu-
scripts, assisted by the textual criticisms pub-
lished by Bishop Blomfield the previous year
in the Cambridge Museum Criticum.

Since Neue's time much has been written
about Sappho, for the most part in Latin or
German. The final revision of the text, and
collection of all that can now be possibly
ascribed to her, was made by Theodor Bergk,
in his Poetae Lyrici Graeci, pp. 82-140 of the
third volume of the fourth edition, 8vo, Leip-
zig, 1882, which I have here, with rare excep-
tions, followed.

There is a noteworthy dissertation on her life
by Theodor Kock, Alkaos und Sappho, 8vo,
Berlin, 1862, in which the arguments and con-
clusions of Welcker are mainly endorsed, and
elaborated with much mythological detail.

Perhaps the fullest account of Sappho which
has recently appeared is that by A. Fernandez
Merino, a third edition of which was published

xviii PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION

at Madrid early last year. Written in Spanish,
it discusses in an impartial spirit every question
concerning Sappho, and is especially valuable
for its copious references.

Professor Domenico Comparetti, the cele-
brated Florentine scholar, to whom I shall have
occasion to refer hereafter, has recently done
much to familiarise Italian readers with the
chief points of Sapphic criticism. His enthusi-
asm for her character and genius is all that can
be desired, but his acceptance of Welcker's
arguments is not so complete as mine. Where
truth must lie between two extremes, and evi-
dence on either side is so hard to collect and
estimate, it is possible for differently constituted
minds to reach very different conclusions. The
motto at the back of my title-page is the guide
I am most willing to follow. But, after all, to
use the words of a friend whom I consulted on
the subject, ' whether the pure think her emo-
tion pure or impure; whether the impure
appreciate it rightly, or misinterpret it; whether,
finally, it was platonic or not ; seems to me to
matter nothing.' Sappho's poetic eminence is
independent of such considerations. To her,

All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,

All are but ministers of Love,
A nd feed his sacred flame.

PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION Xix

Those who wish to learn more about Sappho
than is here recorded will find a guide in the
Bibliography which I have added at the end
of the volume. My sole desire in these pages
is to present ' the great poetess ' to English
readers in a form from which they can judge
of her excellence for themselves, so far as that
is possible for those to whom Aeolic Greek is
unfamiliar. Her more important fragments
have been translated into German, French,
Italian, and Spanish, as well as English ; but
all previous complete editions of her works have
been written solely by scholars for scholars.
Now that, through the appreciation of Sappho
by modern poets and painters, her name is
becoming day by day more familiar, it seems
time to show her as we know her to have been,
to those who have neither leisure nor power to
read her in the tongue in which she wrote.

I have not concerned myself much with tex-
tual criticism, for I do not arrogate any power
of discernment greater than that possessed by
a scholar like Bergk. Only those who realise
what he has done to determine the text of
Sappho can quite appreciate the value of his
work. Where he is satisfied, I am content.
He wrote for the learned few, and I only strive
to popularise the result of such researches as
his : to show, indeed, so far as I can, that

XX PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION

which centuries of scholarship have succeeded
in accomplishing.

The translations by Mr. John Addington
Symonds, dated 1883, were all made especially
for this work in the early part of that year, and
have not been elsewhere published. My thanks
are also due to Mr. Symonds for much valuable
criticism.

The medallion which forms the frontispiece
has been engraved by my friend Mr. John
Cother Webb, after the head of Sappho in the
picture by Mr. L. Alma Tadema, R.A., ex-
hibited at the Royal Academy in 1881, as
'op. ccxxiii.,' and now in America. I trust
that my readers will sympathise with me in
cordial gratitude to both artist and engraver,
to the one for his permission, to the other for
his fidelity.

HENRY T. WHARTON.

39 ST. GEORGE S ROAD,

KILBURN, LONDON, N.W.

May 1885,

LIFE OF SAPPHO

SAPPHO, the one great woman poet of the world,
who called herself Psappha in her own Aeolic
dialect (in fragments i and 59), is said to have
been at the zenith of her fame about the year
6 10 B.C.

During her lifetime Jeremiah first began to
prophesy (628 B.C.), Daniel was carried away
to Babylon (606 B.C.), Nebuchadnezzar besieged
and captured Jerusalem (587 B.C.), Solon was
legislating at Athens, and Tarquinius Priscus,
the fifth king, is said to have been reigning
over Rome. She lived before the birth of
Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, the religion
now professed by perhaps almost a third of the
whole population of the globe.

Two centuries have sufficed to obscure most
of the events in the life of Shakspere; it can
hardly be expected that the lapse of twenty-five
centuries should have left many authentic
records of the history of Sappho. Little even
of that internal evidence, upon which bio-
graphy may rely, can be gathered from her
A

2 LIFE OF SAPPHO

extant poems, in such fragmentary form have
they come down to us. Save for the quota-
tions of grammarians and lexicographers, no
word of hers would have survived. Yet her
writings seem to have been preserved intact till
at least the third century of our era, for
Athenaeus, who wrote about that time, applies
to himself the words of the Athenian comic
poet Epicrates in his Anti-Lais (about 360
B.C.), saying that he too —

Had learned by heart completely all the songs,
Breathing of love, which sweetest Sappho sang.

Scaliger says, although there does not seem
to exist any confirmatory evidence, that the
works of Sappho and other lyric poets were
burnt at Constantinople and at Rome in the
year 1073, in the popedom of Gregory vn.
Cardan says the burning took place under
Gregory Nazianzen, about 380 A.D. And
Petrus Alcyonius relates that he heard when
a boy that very many of the works of the
Greek poets were burnt by order of the
Byzantine emperors, and the poems of
Gregory Nazianzen circulated in their stead.
Bishop Blomfield (Mus. Crit. i. p. 422) thinks
they must all have been destroyed at an early
date, because neither Alcaeus nor Sappho was
annotated by any of the later Grammarians.

LIFE OF SAPPHO 3

'Few indeed, but those, roses,' as the poet
Meleager said, are the precious verses the zeal
of anti-paganism has spared to us.

Of Sappho's parents nothing is definitely
known. Herodotus calls her father Scaman-
dronymus ; and as he wrote within one hundred
and fifty years of her death there is little
reason to doubt his accuracy. But Suidas,
who compiled a Greek lexicon in about the
eleventh century A.D., gives us the choice of
seven other names. Her mother's name was
Cleis. The celebrated Epistle known as that
of Sappho to Phaon, of which I subjoin a
translation by Pope in the Appendix, and
which is commonly ascribed to Ovid,1 says

1 Prof. Domenico Comparetti has lately (1876) pub-
lished an essay on the authenticity of this Epistle and on
its value in elucidating the history of Sappho. After
minutely examining all the evidence against it, he con-
cludes that it is the genuine work of Ovid. And in
1885 De Vries brought out an elaborate dissertation on
the same subject ; he proves, almost to a certainty, that
Ovid wrote the Epistle in question. But the fact
remains that it is absent from all the oldest and best
MSS., and was only given its present place in Ovid's
Heroic Epistles by Heinsius in 1629. Even if it be
genuine, we may safely aver that in Ovid's day it was
far more difficult to estimate Sappho's character rightly
than it is now. The Romans, we can well believe,
were likely to regard her in no other light than that in
which she had been portrayed by the facile and un-
scrupulous comedians of Athens.

4 LIFE OF SAPPHO

Sappho was only six years old ' when the
bones of her parent, gathered up before their
time, drank in her tears ' ; this is supposed to
refer to her father, because in fr. 90 she speaks
of her mother as still alive.

She had two brothers, Charaxus and Lari-
chus; Suidas indeed names a third, Eurygius,
but nothing is known of him.

Larichus was public cup-bearer at Mitylene,
an office only held by youths of noble birth
(ct. fr. 139), whence it is inferred that Sappho
belonged to the wealthy aristocratic class.

Charaxus was occupied in carrying the
highly prized Lesbian wine to Naucratis1 in
Egypt, where he fell in love with a woman of

1 The exact site of Naucr&tis was unknown until
December 1884, when Mr. W. M. Flinders Petrie,
acting as agent for the Egypt Exploration Fund, dis-
covered it at Nebireh, or rather close to El Gaief, a
modem Arab village on the Rosetta mouth of the
Nile, about forty miles from the present sea-coast. It
is near the edge of the Delta, some six miles N.E. of
Tel-el-Barftd, a railway station nearly midway between
Alexandria and Cairo. Before Mr. Petrie's explorations,
Naucratis had been sought for several miles nearer the
sea than it actually lay, and its identification had been
despaired of. For centuries it was the only city in Egypt
in which the Greeks were permitted to settle and carry on
commerce unmolested. lonians, Dorians, and Aeolians
there united in a sort of Hanseatic league, with special re-
presentatives and a common sanctuary, the Panhellenion-

LIFE OF SAPPHO $

great beauty, Doricha or Rhodopis, and
ransomed her from slavery for a great sum
of money. Herodotus says she came originally
from Thrace, and had once served ladmon of
Samos, having been fellow-slave with Aesop
the fabulist. Suidas says Charaxus married
her, and had children by her ; but Herodotus
only says that she was made free by him, and
remained in Egypt, and 'being very lovely,
acquired great riches for a person of her
condition.' Out of a tenth part of her gains
(cf. fr. 138) she furnished the temple of Apollo
at Delphi with a number of iron spits for
roasting oxen on. Athenaeus, however, blames
Herodotus for having confused two different
persons, saying that Charaxus married Doricha,
while it was Rhodopis who sent the spits to
Delphi. Certainly it appears clear that Sappho
in her poem called her Doricha, but Rhodopis,
'Rosy-cheek,' was probably the name by which
she was known among her lovers, on account
of her beauty.

Another confusion respecting Rhodopis is

which served as a tie among them. This rich colony
remained in faithful connection with the mother-country,
contributed to public works in Hellas, received poli-
tical fugitives from that home as guests, and made life
fair for them, as for its own children, after the Greek
model. The women and the flower-garlands of Naucratis
were unsurpassed in beauty.

6 LIFE OF SAPPHO

that in Greece she was believed to have built
the third pyramid ; and Herodotus takes pains
to show that such a work was far beyond the
reach of her wealth, and was really due to
kings of a much earlier date. Still the tale
remained current, false as it undoubtedly was,
at least till the time of Pliny (about 77 A.D.).
It has been shown by Bunsen and others that
it is probable that

The Rhodope that built the pyramid

was Nitocris, the beautiful Egyptian queen
who was the heroine of so many legends;
Mycerinus begaft the third pyramid, and
Nitocris finished it.

Strabo and Aelian relate a story of Rhodopis
which recalls that of Cinderella. One day,
they say, when Rhodopis was bathing at
Naucratis, an eagle snatched up one of her
sandals from the hands of her female attend-
ants, and carried it to Memphis; the eagle,
soaring over the head of the king (whom
Aelian calls Psammetichus 1), who was adminis-
tering justice at the time, let the sandal fall
into his lap. The king, struck with the beauty

1 Psammetichus flourished about 588 B.C. He was
the Pharaoh -hophra mentioned by the prophet Jeremiah
(xliv. 30), whose house in Tahpanhes has been recently
discovered by Mr. Petrie.

LIFE OF SAPPHO 7

of the sandal and the singularity of the in-
cident, sent over all Egypt to discover the
woman to whom it belonged. The owner was
found in the city of Naucratis and brought to
the king ; he made her his queen, and at her
death erected, so the story goes, this third
pyramid in her honour.

Suidas says Sappho 'married one Cercolas,
a man of great wealth, who sailed from Andros,
and,' he adds, 'she had a daughter by him,
named Cleis.' In fr. 85 (cf. fr. 136) Sappho
mentions this daughter Clais by name, and
Ovid, in the Epistle already alluded to, also
refers to her. But the existence of such a hus-
band has been warmly disputed, and the name
(Penifer) and that of his country ( Virllid) are
conjectured to have been invented in ribaldry
by the Comic poets ; certainly it was against
the custom of the Greeks to amass wealth in
one country and go to seek a wife in a distant
island. Some authorities do not mention
Andros, one of the islands of the Cyclades,
but state that Sappho's family belonged to an
Aeolian colony in the Troad.

The age in which Sappho flourished is
mainly determined by concurrent events.
Athenaeus makes her contemporary with
Alyattes the father of Croesus, who reigned
over Lydia from 628 to 570 B.C. Eusebius

8 LIFE OF SAPPHO

mentions her in his Chronicle for the year 604
B.C. Suidas says she lived about the 42nd
Olympiad (612-609 B.C.), in the time of the
poets Alcaeus, Stesichorus, and Pitt^cus. Her
own verses in fr. 28 are said to have been
written in answer to those of Alcaeus address-
ing her —

' lorrAoK arva fieAAixojueioe Zancpoi,
6eAa) TI FetTiHV, aAAa ne KwXuei cu&cor.,

'Violet-weaving, pure, soft-smiling Sappho, I
want to say something, but shame deters me '
(cf. p. 24). Athenaeus says that HermesiSnax,
in an elegy (cf. fr. 26), spoke of Sappho as
beloved by Anacreon, and he quotes from the
third book of some elegiac poetry by Herme-
sianax, 'A Catalogue of things relating to
Love,' these lines of his :

And well thou knowest how famed Alcaeus smote
Of his high harp the love-enlivened strings,

And raised to Sappho's praise the enamoured note,
'Midst noise of mirth and jocund revellings :

Aye, he did love that nightingale of song
With all a lover's fervour, — and, as he

Deftly attuned the lyre, to madness stung
The Teian bard with envious jealousy.

For her Anacreon, charming lyrist, wooed,
And fain would win, with sweet mellifluous chime,

Encircled by her Lesbian sisterhood ;

Would often Samos leave, and many a time

LIFE OF SAPPHO 9

From vanquished Tecs' viny orchards hie
To viny Lesbos' isle, — and from the shore,

O'er the blue wave, on Lectum cast his eye,
And think on bygone days and times no more.
(Translated by]. BAILEY.)

Diphilus too, in his play Sappho, represented
Archilochus and Hipponax as her lovers — for
a joke, as Athenaeus prudently remarks.
Neither of these, however, was a contemporary
of hers, and it seems quite certain that Ana-
creon, who flourished fully fifty years later,
never set eyes on Sappho (cf. fr. 26).

How long she lived we cannot tell. The
epithet repairepa, 'somewhat old,' which she
applies to herself in fr. 75, may have been
merely relative. The story about her brother
Charaxus and Rhodopis would show she lived
at least until 572 B.C., the year of the accession
of Amasis, king of Egypt, under whose reign
Herodotus says Rhodopis flourished ; but one
can scarcely draw so strict an inference. If
what Herodotus says is true, Sappho may have
reached the age of fifty years. At any rate,
'the father of history' is more worthy of
credence than the scandal-mongers. An
inscription on the famous Parian marbles, a
system of chronology compiled, perhaps by a
schoolmaster, in the third century B.C. (cf. p.
17), says: 'When Aristocles reigned over the

10 LIFE OF SAPPHO

Athenians, Sappho fled from Mitylene and
sailed to Sicily ' ; but the exact date is illegible,
though it may be placed between 604 and 592
B.C. It is hardly safe to refer to this Ovid's asser-
tion that she went to Sicily in pursuit of Phaon.

Balancing all the evidence, Fynes-Clinton,
in his Fasti Hellenici, i. p. 225, takes the years
611-592 B.C. to be the period in which Sappho
flourished.

That she was a native of Lesbos, an island
in the Aegean sea, is universally admitted ; and
all but those writers who speak of a second
Sappho say she lived at Mitylene, the chief
city of the island. The existence of a Sappho
who was a courtesan of ErSsus, a smaller
Lesbian city, besides the poetess of Mitylene,
is the invention of comparatively late authors ;
and it is probably due to their desire to detach
the calumnies, which the Comic poets so long
made popular, from the personality of the
poetess to whose good name her own con-
temporaries bore witness (cf. Alcaeus' address
to her, p. 8).

Strabo, in his Geography, says : ' Mitylene
[MiruAHVH or MUTIAHVH] is well provided with
everything. It formerly produced celebrated
men, such as Pittacus, one of the Seven Wise
Men; Alcaeus the poet, and others. Con
temporary with these persons flourished Sappho,

LIFE OF SAPPHO II

who was something wonderful; at no period
within memory has any woman been known
who in any, even the least degree, could be
compared to her for poetry.' Indeed, the glory
of Lesbos was that Sappho was its citizen, and
its chief fame centres in the fact of her
celebrity. By its modern name Mitilene,
under the dominion of the Turks, the island,

Where burning Sappho loved and sung,

is now mainly known for its oil and wine and
its salubrity. In ancient times its wine was
the most celebrated through all Greece; and
Vergil refers to its vines, which trailed like ivy
on the ground, while many authors testify to
the exceptional wholesomeness of Lesbian wine.
But the clue to Sappho's individuality can only
be found in the knowledge of what, in her age,
Lesbos and the Lesbians were ; around her
converges all we know of the Aeolian race. As
Mr. Swinburne says —

Had Sappho's self not left her word thus long

For token,
The sea round Lesbos yet in waves of song

Had spoken.

'For a certain space of time,' writes Mr. J.
Addington Symonds in his Studies of Greek
Poets, first series, pp. 127 ff., 'the Aeolians
occupied the very foreground of Greek litera-

12 LIFE OF SAPPHO

ture, and blazed out with a brilliance of lyrical
splendour that has never been surpassed.
There seems to have been something passion-
ate and intense in their temperament, which
made the emotions of the Dorian and the
Ionian feeble by comparison. Lesbos, the
centre of Aeolian culture, was the island of
overmastering passions ; the personality of the
Greek race burned there with a fierce and
steady flame of concentrated feeling. The
energies which the lonians divided between
pleasure, politics, trade, legislation, science,
and the arts, and which the Dorians turned to
war and statecraft and social economy, were
restrained by the Aeolians within the sphere
of individual emotions, ready to burst forth
volcanically. Nowhere in any age of Greek
history, or in any part of Hellas, did the love
of physical beauty, the sensibility to radiant
scenes of nature, the consuming fervour of
personal feeling, assume such grand proportions
and receive so illustrious an expression as they
did in Lesbos. At first this passion blossomed
into the most exquisite lyrical poetry that the
world has known : this was the flower-time of
the Aeolians, their brief and brilliant spring.
But the fruit it bore was bitter and rotten.
Lesbos became a byword for corruption. The
passions which for a moment had flamed into

LIFE OF SAPPHO 13

the gorgeousness of Art, burnt their envelope
of words and images, remained a mere furnace
of sensuality, from which no expression of the
divine in human life could be expected. In
this the Lesbian poets were not unlike the
Provencal troubadours, who made a literature
of Love ; or the Venetian painters, who based
their Art upon the beauty of colour, the
voluptuous charms of the flesh. In each case
the motive of enthusiastic passion sufficed to
produce a dazzling result. But as soon as its
freshness was exhausted there was nothing left
for Art to live on, and mere decadence to
sensuality ensued. Several circumstances con-
tributed to aid the development of lyric poetry
in Lesbos. The customs of the Aeolians
permitted more social and domestic freedom
than was common in Greece. Aeolian women
were not confined to the harem like lonians,
or subjected to the rigorous discipline of the
Spartans. While mixing freely with male
society, they were highly educated, and accus-
tomed to express their sentiments to an extent
unknown elsewhere in history — until, indeed,
the present time. The Lesbian ladies applied
themselves successfully to literature. They
formed clubs for the cultivation of poetry and
music. They studied the art of beauty, and
sought to refine metrical forms and diction.

14 LIFEOFSAPPHO

Nor did they confine themselves to the
scientific side of Art. Unrestrained by public
opinion, and passionate for the beautiful, the}'
cultivated their senses and emotions, and
developed their wildest passions. All the
luxuries and elegances of life which that climate
and the rich valleys of Lesbos could afford,
were at their disposal: exquisite gardens, in
which the rose and hyacinth spread perfume ;
river-beds ablaze with the oleander and wild
pomegranate ; olive-groves and fountains, where
the cyclamen and violet flowered with feathery
maidenhair ; pine-shadowed coves, where they
might bathe in the calm of a tideless sea ; fruits
such as only the southern sea and sea-wind can
mature ; marble cliffs, starred with jonquil and
anemone in spring, aromatic with myrtle and
lentisk and samphire and wild rosemary through
all the months ; nightingales that sang in May ;
temples dim with dusky gold and bright with
ivory; statues and frescoes of heroic forms.
In such scenes as these the Lesbian poets lived,
and thought of Love. When we read their
poems, we seem to have the perfumes, colours,
sounds, and lights of that luxurious land dis-
tilled in verse. Nor was a brief but biting
winter wanting to give tone to their nerves,
and, by contrast with the summer, to prevent
the palling of so much luxury on sated senses.

LIFE OF SAPPHO 1$

The voluptuousness of Aeolian poetry is not
like that of Persian or Arabian art. It is Greek
in its self-restraint, proportion, tact. We find
nothing burdensome in its sweetness. All is
so rhythmically and sublimely ordered in the
poems of Sappho that supreme art lends
solemnity and grandeur to the expression of
unmitigated passion.'

The story of Sappho's love for Phaon, and
her leap from the Leucadian rock in con-
sequence of his disdaining her, though it has
been so long implicitly believed, does not seem
to rest on any firm historical basis. Indeed,
more than one epigrammatist in the Greek
Anthology expressly states that she was buried
in an Aeolic grave.1

Still Phaon, for all the myths that cluster
round his name, for his miraculous loveliness
and his insensibility to love, may yet have been
a real personage. Like other heroes, he may
possibly have lived at a period long anterior to

1 Such light as can be thrown upon the legend from
Comparative Mythology, and from the possible etymo-
logies of the names of Sappho and Phaon, has been, I
fear rather inconclusively, gathered by Leonello Modona
in his La Saffo storica (Florence, 1878). Human nature,
however, varies so little from age to age, that I think it
better to judge the story as it has come down to us, than
to resort to the most erudite guessing.

16 LIFE OF SAPPHO

that of the traditions about him which have
been handed down to us. He is said to have
been a boatman of Mitylene (cf. fr. 140), who
was endowed by Aphrodite with youth and
extraordinary beauty as a reward for his having
ferried her for nothing. Servius, who wrote
about 400 A.D. (cf. p. 39), says she gave him an
alabaster box of ointment, the effect of which
was to make all women fall in love with him j
and that one of these — he does not mention
her name — threw herself in despair from the
cliff of Leucas. Servius further states, on the
authority of Menander, that the temple was
founded by Phaon of Lesbos. Phaon's beauty
and power of fascination passed into a proverb.
Pliny, however, says he became the object of
Sappho's love because he had found the male
root of the plant called eryngo, probably our
sea-holly, and that it acted like a love-charm.
And when Athenaeus is talking about lettuces,
as to their use as food and their anti-aphrodisiac
properties, he says Callimachus' story of Aphro-
dite hiding Adonis under a lettuce is 'an
allegorical statement of the poet's, intended
to show that those who are much addicted to
the use of lettuces are very little adapted for
pleasures of love. Cratinus,' he goes on, ' says
that Aphrodite when in love with Phaon hid
him in the leaves of lettuces ; but the younger

LIFE OF SAPPHO I/

Marsyas says that she hid him amid the grass
of barley.'

Those fanciful writers who assert the exist-
ence of a second Sappho say that it was not
the poetess who fell in love with Phaon, but
that other Sappho on whom they fasten all the
absurd stories circulated by the Comic writers.
The tale runs that the importunate love of
Sappho caused Phaon to flee to Sicily, whither
she followed him. Ovid's Epistle, before men-
tioned (p. 3), is the foundation for the greater
part of the legend. The inscription on the
Parian marbles (cf. p. 9) also mentions a
certain year in which 'Sappho sailed from
Mitylene and fled to Sicily.' The chronicle,
however, says nothing about Phaon, nor is any
reason given for her exile ; some have imagined
that she was obliged to leave her country on
political grounds, but there is no trace in her
writings, nor does any report indicate, that she
ever interested herself in politics.

Strabo, in his Geography already quoted
(p. 10), says: 'There is a white rock which
stretches out from Leucas to the sea and to-
wards Cephallenia, that takes its name from its
whiteness. The rock of Leucas has upon it
a temple of Apollo, and the leap from it was
believed to stop love. From this it is said that
Sappho first, as Menander says somewhere, "in
B

18 LIFE OF SAPPHO

pursuit of the haughty Phaon, urged on by
maddening desire, threw herself from its far-
seen rocks, imploring thee [Apollo], lord and
king."' The former promontory of Leucas is
now separated from the mainland and forms
one of the Ionian islands, known as Santa
Maura, off the wild and rugged coast of Acar-
nania. The story of Sappho's having ventured
the Leucadian leap is repeated by Ovid, and
was never much doubted, except by those who
believed in a second Sappho, till modern times.
Still, it is strange that none of the many authors
who relate the legend say what was the result
of the leap — whether it was fatal to her life or
to her love. Moreover, Ptolemy Hephaestion
(about 100 A.D.), who, in the extant summary
of his works published in the Myriobiblion of
Photius, gives a list of many men and women
who by the Leucadian leap were cured of the
madness of love or perished, does not so much
as mention the name of Sappho. A circum-
stantial account of Sappho's leap, on which
the popular modern idea is chiefly founded,
was given by Addison, relying to no small
extent upon his imagination for his facts, ' with
his usual exquisite humour, as Warton remarks,
in the 2 33rd Spectator, Nov. 27,1711. ' Sappho
the Lesbian,' says Addison, 'in love with Phaon,
arrived at the temple of Apollo habited like a

LIFE OF SAPPHO 1 9

bride, in garments as white as snow. She
wore a garland of myrtle on her head, and
carried in her hand the little musical instru-
ment of her own invention. After having sung
a hymn to Apollo, she hung up her garland on
one side of his altar, and her harp on the other.
She then tucked up her vestments like a Spar-
tan virgin, and amidst thousands of spectators,
who were anxious for her safety and offered up
vows for her deliverance, marched directly for-
wards to the utmost summit of the promontory,
where, after having repeated a stanza of her
own verses, which we could not hear, she
threw herself off the rock with such an intre-
pidity as was never before observed in any who
had attempted that dangerous leap. Many who
were present related that they saw her fall into
the sea, from whence she never rose again :
though there were others who affirmed that she
never came to the bottom of her leap, but that
she was changed into a swan as she fell, and
that they saw her hovering in the air under
that shape. But whether or no the whiteness
and fluttering of her garments might not de-
ceive those who looked upon her, or whether
she might not really be metamorphosed into
that musical and melancholy bird, is still
a doubt among the Lesbians. Alcaeus, the
famous lyric poet, who had for some time been

20 LIFE OF SAPPHO

passionately in love with Sappho, arrived at the
promontory of Leucate that very evening in
order to take the leap upon her account ; but
hearing that Sappho had been there before
him, and that her body could be nowhere
found, he very generously lamented her fall,
and is said to have written his hundred and
twenty-fifth ode upon that occasion.'

It is to be noted in this connection that the
part of the cliff of Santa Maura or Leukadi,
known to this day as ' Sappho's Leap,' was used,
even in historical times, as a place whence cri-
minals condemned to death were thrown into
the sea. The people used, it is said, to tie num-
bers of birds to the limbs of the condemned
and cover them with feathers to break the force
of their fall, and then send boats to pick them
up. If they survived, they were pardoned.

Those modern critics who reject the whole
story as fabulous derive it from the myth of the
love of Aphrodite and Adonis, who in the Greek
version was called Phaethon or Phaon. Theo-
dor Kock (cf. Preface, p. xvii) is the latest
exponent of these views, and he pushes them
to a very fanciful extent, even adducing Minos
as the sun and Britomartis as the moon to ex-
plain the Leucadian leap. Certainly the legend
does not appear before the Attic Comedy,
about 395 B.C., more than two centuries after

LIFE OF SAPPHO 21

Sappho's death. And the Leucadian leap
may have been ascribed to her from its having
been often mentioned as a mere poetical meta-
phor taken from an expiatory rite connected
with the worship of Apollo ; the image occurs
in Stesichorus and Anacreon, and may possibly
have been used by Sappho. For instance,
Athenaeus cites a poem by Stesichorus about
a maiden named Calyca who was in love with
a youth named Euathlus, and prayed in a
modest manner to Aphrodite to aid her in
becoming his wife ; but when the young man
scorned her, she threw herself from a precipice :
and this he says happened near Leucas. Athen-
aeus says the poet represented the maiden as
particularly modest, so that she was not willing
to live with the youth on his own terms, but
prayed that if possible she might become the
wedded wife of Euathlus ; and if that were not
possible, that she might be released from life.
And Anacreon, in a fragment preserved by
Hephaestion, says, as if proverbially, 'Now
again rising I, drunk with love, dive from the
Leucadian rock into the hoary wave.'
And Sappho with that gloriole

Of ebon hair on calmed brows —
O poet- woman, none forgoes
The leap, attaining the repose !

(MRS. E. B. BROWNING.)

22 LIFE OF SAPPHO

Sappho 'loved, and loved more than once,
and loved to the point of desperate sorrow;
though it did not come to the mad and fatal
leap from Leucate, as the unnecessary legend
pretends. There are, nevertheless,' continues
Mr. Edwin Arnold, 'worse steeps than Leu-
cate down which the heart may fall; and
colder seas of despair than the Adriatic in
which to engulf it'

Seeing that six comedies are known to have
been written under the title of Sappho (cf. p. 37),
and that her history furnished material for at
least four more, it is not strange that much of
their substance should in succeeding centuries
have been regarded as genuine. In a later and
debased age she became a sort of stock char-
acter of the licentious drama. The fervour of
her love and the purity of her life, and the
very fact of a woman having been the leader
of a school of poetry and music, could not
have failed to have been misunderstood by
the Greek comedians at the close of the fifth
century B.C. The society and habits of the
Aeolians at Lesbos in Sappho's time were, as
M. Bournouf (Lit. Grecq. i. p. 194) has shown,
in complete contrast to those of the Athenians
in the period of their corruption ; just as the
unenviable reputation of the Lesbians was
earned long after the date of Sappho. ' It is

LIFE OF SAPPHO 23

not surprising,' writes Mr. Philip Smith, in his
article SAPPHO in Smith's Dictionary of Greek
and Roman Biography, ' that the early Christian
writers against heathenism should have accepted
a misrepresentation which the Greeks them-
selves had invented.' The licence of the Attic
comedians is testified by Athenaeus' mention
that Antiochus of Alexandria, a writer other-
wise unknown, whose date is quite uncertain,
wrote a ' Treatise on the Poets who were ridi-
culed by the Comic writers of the Middle
Comedy ' ; and by the fact that a little before
403 B.C. a law was passed which enacted that
no one was to be represented on the stage by
name, MH 6eiv ovojuaori K0)jucp6eiv (cf. p. 38).

It was not till early in the present century
that the current calumnies against Sappho were
seriously inquired into by the celebrated scholar
of Gottingen, Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, and
found to be based on quite insufficient evidence.
Colonel Mure endeavoured at great length, both
here and in Germany, to expose fallacies in
Welcker's arguments ; but the bitterness of his
attack, and the unfairness of much of his reason-
ing, go far to weaken his otherwise acknow-
ledged authority. Professor Comparetti has
recently examined the question with much
fairness and erudition, and, with the possible
exception referred to above (p. 3, note), has

24 LIFE OF SAPPHO

done much to separate fiction from fact ; but he
does not endorse all Welcker's conclusions.

Sappho seems to have been the centre of a
society in Mitylene, a kind of aesthetic club,
devoted to the service of the Muses. Around
her gathered maidens from even comparatively
distant places, attracted by her fame, to study
under her guidance all that related to poetry
and music; much as at a later age students
resorted to the philosophers of Athens.

The names of fourteen of her girl-friends
(rratpcu) and pupils (na8HTpim) are preserved.
The most celebrated was Erinna of Telos, a
poetess of whose genius too few lines are left
for us to judge ; but we know what the ancients
thought of her from this Epigram in the Greek
Anthology :

These are Erinna's songs : how sweet, though slight ! —
For she was but a girl of nineteen years : —

Yet stronger far than what most men can write :

Had Death delayed, whose fame had equalled hers?

(J. A. SYMONDS.)

Probably fr. 77 refers to her. Of the other
poetess, Damophyla of Pamphylia, not a word
survives; but Apollonius of Tyana says she
lived in close friendship with Sappho, and made
poems after her model. Suidas says Sappho's
'companions and friends were three, viz., Atthis,
Telesippa, and Megara ; and her pupils were

LIFE OF SAPPHO 2$

Anagora of the territory of Miletus, Gongyla of
Colophon, and Euneica of Salamis.' She her-
self praises Mnasidica along with Gyrinna (as
Maximus Tyrius spells the name) in fr. 76 ; she
complains of Atthis preferring Andromeda to
her in fr. 41 ; she gibes at Andromeda in fr. 70,
and again refers to her in fr. 58, apparently re-
joicing over her discomfiture. Of Gorgo, in fr. 48,
she seems to say, in Swinburne's paraphrase,

I am weary of all thy words and soft strange ways.

Anactoria's name is not mentioned in any
fragment we have, although tradition says that
fr. 2 was addressed to her; but Maximus
Tyrius and others place her in the front rank
of Sappho's intimates : ' What Alcibiades,' he
says, 'and Charmides and Phaedrus were to
Socrates, Gyrinna and Atthis and Anactoria
were to the Lesbian.' Another, Dica, we find
her (in fr. 78) praising for her skill in weaving
coronals. And in ft. 86 a daughter of Polyanax
is addressed as one of her maidens. The name
is not preserved of her whom (in fr. 68) she
reproaches as disloyal to the service of the
Muses. The text of Ovid's Sappho to Phaon
is so corrupt that we know not whom she is
enumerating there of those she loved ; even the
name of her ' fair Cydno ' varies in the MSS. Nor
can we tell who ' those other hundred maidens '

26 LIFE OF SAPPHO

were whom Ovid (cf. p. 188) makes her say she
' blamelessly loved ' before Phaon satisfied her
heart. But the preservation of the names of
so many of her associates is enough to prove
the celebrity of her teaching.

Little more can be learnt about Sappho's
actual life. In fr. 72 she says of herself, ' I am
not one of a malignant nature, but have a quiet
temper.' Antiphanes, in his play Sappho, is
said by Athenaeus to have represented her
proposing absurd riddles,1 so little did the
Comic writers understand her genius. Fr. 79
is quoted by Athenaeus to show her love for
beauty and honour. Compare also fr. 1 1 and
31 for his testimony to the purity of her
love for her girl-friends : ndvra KaOapa TOIQ
Kaeapolc, ' unto the pure all things are pure.'

Plato, in his Phaedrus, calls Sappho ' beauti-
ful,' for the sweetness of her songs ; ' and yet,'
says Maximus Tyrius, ' she was small and dark,'
une petite brunette, — ' est etiomfusco grata colore
venus ' .•

The small dark body's Lesbian loveliness
That held the fire eternal.

(SWINBURNE.)

The epithet ' beautiful ' is repeated by so many

1 Sappho's riddle is translated in full by Colonel
Higginson in his Atlatitic Essays, p. 321.

LIFE OF SAPPHO 2/

writers that it may everywhere refer only to the
beauty of her writings. Even Ovid seems to
think that her genius threw any lack of comeli-
ness into the shade — a lack, however, which, if
it had existed, could not have escaped the
derision of the Comic writers, especially since
Homer (Iliad, ix. 129, 271) had celebrated the
characteristic beauty of the women of Lesbos.
The address of Alcaeus to Sappho, quoted on
p. 8, shows the sweetness of her expression,
even if the epithet ionAoKoc (violet-weaving)
cannot be replaced by ionAoKajucx; (with violet
locks), as some MSS. read. And Damocharis,
in the Greek Anthology, in an Epigram on a
statue of Sappho, speaks of her bright eyes
showing her wisdom, and compares the beauty
of her face to that of Aphrodite. To another
writer in the Greek Anthology she is ' the pride of
the lovely-haired Lesbians.' Anacreon, as well as
Philoxenus, calls her 'sweet-voiced' (cf. fr. i).

But thou6h we know so little of Sappho's
personal appearance, the whole testimony of
the ancient writers describes the charm of her
poetry with unbounded praise.

Strabo, in his Geography, calls her 'something
wonderful' (eaujuaorov TI XP""101)' an<^ Sa7s ne
knew ' no woman who in any, even the least
degree, could be compared to her for poetry '
(cf. p. 10).

28 LIFE OF SAPPHO

Such was her unique renown that she was
called ' The Poetess,5 just as Homer was ' The
Poet.' Plato numbers her among the Wise.
Plutarch speaks of the grace of her poems acting
on her listeners like an enchantment, and says
that when he read them he set aside the
drinking-cup in very shame. So much was a
knowledge of her writings held to be an essential
of culture among the Greeks, that Philodemus,
a contemporary of Cicero, in an Epigram in the
Greek Anthology^ notes as the mark of an ill-
informed woman that she could not even sing
Sappho's songs.

Writers in the Greek Anthology call her the
Tenth Muse, child of Aphrodite and Eros,
nursling of the Graces and Persuasion, pride of
Hellas, companion of Apollo, and prophesy her
immortality. For instance, Antipater of Sidon
says:

Does Sappho then beneath thy bosom rest,
Aeolian earth? That mortal Muse, confessed
Inferior only to the choir above,
That foster-child of Venus and of Love ;
Warm from whose lips divine Persuasion came,
Greece to delight, and raise the Lesbian name.

O ye who ever twine the three-fold thread,
Ye Fates, why number with the silent dead
That mighty songstress whose unrivalled powers
Weave for the Muse a crown of deathless flowers ?
(FRANCIS HODGSON.)

LIFE OF SAPPHO 29

And Tullius Laurea :

Stranger, who passest my Aeolian tomb,

Say not ' The Lesbian poetess is dead ' ;

Men's hands this mound did raise, and mortal's work

Is swiftly buried in forgetfulness.

But if thou lookest, for the Muses' sake,

On me whom all the Nine have garlanded,

Know thou that I have Hades' gloom escaped :

No dawn shall lack the lyrist Sappho's name.

And Piny"tus :

This tomb reveals where Sappho's ashes lie,
But her sweet words of wisdom ne'er will die.

(LORD N EAVES.)

And Plato :

Some thoughtlessly proclaim the Muses nine ;
A tenth is Lesbian Sappho, maid divine.

(LORD NEAVBS.)

Indeed, all the praises of the Epigrammatists
are in the same strain; none but held her,
with the poetess Nossis, 'the flower of the
Graces.'

Many authors relate how the Lesbians
gloried in Sappho's having been their citizen,
and say that her image was engraved on the
coins of Mitylene — ' though she was a woman/
as Aristotle remarks. J. C. Wolf describes six
extant coins which may presumably have been
struck at different times in honour of her ; he

30 LIFE OF SAPPHO

gives a figure of each on his frontispiece, but
they have little artistic merit.

It is worthy of note that no coins bearing
the name or effigy of Sappho have hitherto
been discovered which were current before the
Christian era, so that no conclusion drawn from
inscriptions on them is of any historical import-
ance. In the time of the Antonines, from which
most of these coins seem to date, her name
was as much sullied by traditions as it has been
to the present day.

Some busts there are of her, but none seem
genuine. Perhaps the best representation of
what she and her surroundings might have
been is given by Mr. Alma Tadema in his
' Sappho,' exhibited at the Royal Academy in
1 88 1, which has been etched by Mr. C. O.
Murray, and admirably photographed in various
sizes by the Berlin Photographic Company ;
from the head of Sappho in this picture Mr.
J. C. Webb has engraved the medallion which
forms the frontispiece of this work.

A bronze statue of Sappho was splendidly
made by Silanion, and stolen by Verres, accord-
ing to Cicero, from the prytaneum at Syracuse.
And Christodorus, in the Greek Anthology,
describes a statue of her as adorning the gym-
nasium of Zeuxippus at Byzantium in the fifth
century A.D. Pliny says that Leon, an artist

LIFE OF SAPPHO 31

otherwise unknown, painted a picture of her in
the garb of a lutist (psaltrid).

Numerous illustrations of her still exist upon
Greek vases, most of which have been repro-
duced and annotated upon by Professor Com-
paretti (see Bibliography) ; but they are all in
a debased style, and one would feel more con-
tent if one had not seen them.

Not only do we know the general estimate of
Sappho by antiquity, but her praise is also often
given in great detail. Dionysius of Halicar-
nassus, when he quotes her Ode to Aphrodite
{fr. i), describes at length the beauty of her
style. Some of Demetrius' praise is quoted as
fr. 124, but he also elaborately shows her com-
mand of all the figures and arts of rhetoric.
What Longinus, Plutarch, and Aristoxenus
thought of her I have summarised under fr. 2.
The story of Solon's praise is given under fr.
137. And Plutarch in his Life of Demetrius, tell-
ing a story of Antiochus' (324-261 B.C.) being in
love with Stratonice, the young wife of his father,
and making a "pretence of sickness, says that his
physician Erasistratus discovered the object of
the passion he was endeavouring to conceal by
observing his behaviour at the entrance of every
visitor to his sick chamber. 'When others
entered,' says Plutarch, 'he was entirely un-
affected ; but when Stratonice came in, as she

32 LIFEOFSAPPHO

often did, either alone or with Seleucus [his
father, King of Syria], he showed all the symp-
toms described by Sappho, the faltering voice,
the burning blush, the languid eye, the sudden
sweat, the tumultuous pulse ; and at length, the
passion overcoming his spirits, he fainted to a
mortal paleness.' The physician noted what
Sappho had described as the true signs of love,
and Plutarch touchingly relates how the king in
consequence surrendered Stratonice to his son,
and made them king a: <! queen of Upper Asia.

Modern writers are not less unanimous than
the ancients in their praise of Sappho. Addison
prefixes this quotation from Phaedrus (iii. i, 5),
to his first essay on her (Spectator, No. 223):
' O sweet soul, how good must you have been
heretofore, when your remains are so delicious ! '
' Her soul,' he says, ' seems to have been
made up of love and poetry. She felt the
passion in all its warmth, and described it in
all its symptoms. ... I do not know,' he
goes on, 'by the character that is given of
her works, whether it is not for the benefit of
mankind that they are lost. They are filled
with such bewitching tenderness and rapture,
that it might have been dangerous to have
given them a reading.'

Mr. J. Addington Symonds says : ' The world
has suffered no greater literary loss than the loss

LIFE OF SAPPHO 33

of Sappho's poems. So perfect are the small-
est fragments preserved . . . that we muse in
a sad rapture of astonishment to think what
the complete poems must have been. .
Of all the poets of the world, of all the illus-
trious artists of all literatures, Sappho is the one
whose every word has a peculiar and unmistak-
able perfume, a seal of absolute perfection and
illimitable grace. In her art she was unerring.
Even Archilochus seems commonplace when
compared with her exquisite rarity of phrase.
. . . Whether addressing the maidens, whom
even in Elysium, as Horace says, Sappho could
not forget; or embodying the profounder
yearnings of an intense soul after beauty which
has never on earth existed, but which inflames
the hearts of noblest poets, robbing their eyes
of sleep, and giving them the bitterness of tears
to drink— these dazzling fragments

Which still, like sparkles of Greek fire,
Burn on ihrough Time, and ne'er expire,

are the ultimate and finished forms of passionate
utterance, diamonds, topazes, and blazing rubies,
in which the fire of the soul is crystallised for
ever. ... In Sappho and Catullus ... we
meet with richer and more ardent natures [than
those of Horace and Alcaeus] : they are endowed
with keener sensibilities, with a sensuality
C

34 LIFE OF SAPPHO

more noble because of its intensity, with
emotions more profound, with a deeper faculty
of thought, that never loses itself in the shallows
of "Stoic-Epicurean acceptance," but simply
and exquisitely apprehends the facts of human
life.'

And some passages from Swinburne's Notes
on Poems and Reviews, showing a modern
poet's endeavour to familiarise his readers with
Sappho's spirit, can hardly be omitted. Speak-
ing of his poem Anactoria, he says : ' In this
poem I have simply expressed, or tried to
express, that violence of affection between one
and another which hardens into rage and
deepens into despair. The keynote which I
have here touched,' he continues, ' was struck
long since by Sappho. We in England are
taught, are compelled under penalties to learn,
to construe, and to repeat, as schoolboys, the
imperishable and incomparable verses of that
supreme poet; and I at least am grateful for
the training. I have wished, and I have even
ventured to hope, that I might be in time
competent to translate into a baser and later
language the divine words which even when a
boy I could not but recognise as divine. That
hope, if indeed I dared ever entertain such a
hope, I soon found fallacious. To translate
the two odes and the remaining fragments of

LIFE OF SAPPHO 35

Sappho is the one impossible task; and as
witness of this I will call up one of the greatest
among poets. Catullus "translated" — or as
his countrymen would now say " traduced " —
the Ode to Anactoria — Eig ' Epeonevav : a more
beautiful translation there never was and will
never be ; but compared with the Greek, it is
colourless and bloodless, puffed out by addi-
tions and enfeebled by alterations. Let any
one set against each other the two first stanzas,
Latin and Greek, and pronounce. . . . Where
Catullus failed, I could not hope to succeed;
I tried instead to reproduce in a diluted and
dilated form the spirit of a poem which could
not be reproduced in the body.

' Now the ode Etc ' EpcoMevav — the " Ode to
Anactoria " (as it is named by tradition) — the
poem . . . which has in the whole world of
verse no companion and no rival but the Ode
to Aphrodite, has been twice at least translated
or traduced. . . . To the best (and bad is
the best) of their ability, they [Nicholas Boileau-
Despreaux and Ambrose Philips] have "done
into" bad French and bad English the very
words of Sappho. Feeling that although I
might do it better I could not do it well, I
abandoned the idea of translation — exoov CKKOVTI
f€ eujucp- I tried then to write some para-
phrase of the fragments which the Fates and

36 LIFEOFSAPPHO

the Christians have spared us. I have not
said, as Boileau and Philips have, that the
speaker sweats and swoons at sight of her
favourite by the side of a man. I have ab-
stained from touching on such details, for this
reason : that I felt myself incompetent to give
adequate expression in English to the literal
and absolute words of Sappho ; and would not
debase and degrade them into a viler form.
No one can feel more deeply than I do the
inadequacy of my work. " That is not Sappho,"
a friend once said to me. I could only reply,
" It is as near as I can come ; and no man can
come close to her." Her remaining verses are
the supreme 'success, the final achievement, of
the poetic art. ... I have striven to cast my
spirit into the mould of hers, to express and
represent not the poem but the poet. I did
not think it requisite to disfigure the page with
a footnote wherever I had fallen back upon
the original text. Here and there, I need not
say, I have rendered into English the very
words of Sappho. I have tried also to work
into words of my own some expression of their
effect: to bear witness how, more than any
other's, her verses strike and sting the memory
in lonely places, or at sea, among all loftier
sights and sounds — how they seem akin to fire
and air, being themselves "all air and fire";

LIFE OF SAPPHO 37

other element there is none in them. As to
the angry appeal against the supreme mystery
of oppressive heaven, which I have ventured to
put into her mouth at that point only where
pleasure culminates in pain, affection in anger,
and desire in despair — they are to be taken
as the first outcome or outburst of foiled and
fruitless passion recoiling on itself. After this,
the spirit finds time to breathe and repose
above all vexed senses of the weary body, all
bitter labours of the revolted soul ; the poet's
pride of place is resumed, the lofty conscience
of invincible immortality in the memories and
the mouths of men.' No one who wishes to
understand Sappho can afford to neglect a
study of the poem thus annotated by its
author. As Professor F. T. Palgrave justly
says, 'Sappho is truly pictorial in the ancient
sense : the image always simply presented ; the
sentiment left to our sensibility.'

The Greek comedies relating to the history
of Sappho, referred to on previous pages, were
all written by dramatists who belonged to what
is known as the Middle Comedy, two centuries
after her time (404-340 B.C.). The comedy of
that period was devoted to satirising classes of
people rather than individuals, to ridiculing
stock-characters, to criticising the systems and
merits of philosophers and writers, to parodies

38 LIFE OF SAPPHO

of older poets, and to travesties of mythological
subjects. The extent to which the licence of
the comic writers of that age had reached may
be judged from the passing of the law referred
to on a previous page (p. 23) — HH 6ew ovo/uaon
KtojucpSetv — though the practice continued under
ill-concealed disguise. Writers of such a temper
were obviously unfit to hand down unsullied a
character like Sappho's, powerful though their
genius might be to make their inventions seem
more true than actual history — 'to make the
worse appear the better reason.'

Sappho was the title of comedies by Amei-
psias, Amphis, Antiphanes, Dlphilus, Ephip-
pus, and Timocles, but very little is known
of their contents. Of those by Ameipsias
and Amphis only a single word out of each
survives. Athenaeus quotes a few lines out of
those by Ephippus and Timocles, for descrip-
tions of men of contemptible character. The
same writer refers to that by Diphilus for his
use of the name of a kind of cup (MeTavurrpu;)
which was used to drink out of when men had
washed their hands after dinner, and for his
having represented Archilochus and Hipponax
(cf. p. 9) as lovers of Sappho. Of that by Anti-
phanes (cf. p. 26), who was the most celebrated
and the most prolific of the playwrights of the
Middle Comedy, we have, again in Athenaeus,

LIFE OF SAPPHO 39

a longer passage preserved ; but it is merely to
show the poetess proposing and solving a weari-
some riddle (rpi9o<;), satirising a subtlety his
grosser audience could not understand.

Besides these, Antiphanes and Plato (the
Comic writer, not the philosopher) each wrote
a play called Phaon. Of that by Antiphanes
but three words remain. Plato's drama is
several times quoted by Athenaeus, but only
when he is discussing details of cookery — one
passage obviously for the sake of its coarseness.
Menander wrote a play called Leucadia, and
Antiphanes one called Leucadius. Antiphanes'
play furnishes Athenaeus with nothing but a
catalogue of seasonings. Some lines out of
Menander's Leucadia are quoted above (p. 17)
from Strabo, and it is referred to by several
authors for the sake of some word or phrase ;
Servius, commenting on Vergil's Aeneid, iii.
274, gives a precis of Turpilius' Latin para-
phrase of it, which is mentioned above, p. 16.

Such is our knowledge of the Comic accounts
of Sappho's history. When we consider the
general character of the Middle Comedy,
written as it was to please the Athenians after
their golden time had passed, it is not un-
reasonable to take accounts which seem to have
originated in such treatment with somewhat
more than diffidence.

4O LIFE OF SAPPHO

But it is not only the Greek dramatists who
have written plays on the story of Sappho.
Two have appeared in English during the last
few years, one of which, by the late Mrs.
Estelle Lewis ('Stella'), has been translated
into modern Greek by Cambourogio for repre-
sentation on the Athenian stage. The most
celebrated, however, and one of considerable
beauty, is by John Lilly, ' the Euphuist ' ; it is
called Sapho and Phao, and was acted before
Queen Elizabeth in 1584. The whole is
allegorical, Sapho being probably meant for
Elizabeth, queen of an island, and Phao is
supposed to be Leicester. Lilly makes his
Sapho a princess of Syracuse, and takes other
liberties — though not such as the Greeks did
— with her history ; strangely enough, however,
he makes no reference to the Leucadian leap.
'When Phao cometh,' he makes Sapho solilo-
quise, ' what then ? Wilt thou open thy love ?
Yea? No, Sapho, but staring in his face till
thine eyes dazzle and thy spirits faint, die
before his face; then this shall be written
on thy tomb, that though thy love were
greater than wisdom could endure, yet thine
honour was such as love could not violate.'
Venus is introduced as marring their mutual
love, and Phao says : ' This shall be my
resolution, wherever I wander, to be as I

LIFE OF SAPPHO 41

•were kneeling before Sapho ; my loyalty
unspotted, though unrewarded. . . . My life
shall be spent in sighing and wishing, the
one for my bad fortune, the other for Sapho's
good.'

In France, the first opera written by the
late M. Charles Gounod was entitled Sapho.
The libretto was by M. Emile Augier. It
was first given at the Academie, April 16,
1851 ; and in Italian, as Saffo, at Covent
Garden, Aug. 9, in the same year. It was re-
produced in 1858, and again in the new Opera
House, April 3, 1884. Each time both author
and composer recast their work, which contains
many brilliant scenes and melodies. The
celebrated Madame de Stael wrote a drama
called Sapho, but it has been long forgotten.
Alphonse Daudet's novel, Sapho, mceurs Pari-
siennes, of which a version dramatised by M.
Belot was played for the first time at the
Gymnase in Paris, December 18, 1885, bears
no reference to the poetess beyond the sobri-
quet of the heroine. The most artistically
finished tragedy of the German dramatist
Grillparzer is his Sappho. It was produced at
Vienna in 1819, and is still played at many of
the principal German theatres. An inferior
Italian translation of it received a high en-
comium from Lord Byron. It is best known

42 LIFE OF SAPPHO

to English readers by Miss Ellen Frothingham's
faithful translation.

About forty years ago, however, Messrs.
Thomas Constable & Co., of Edinburgh, had
issued an earlier translation of the play by
L. C. C. [i.e. Lucy Caroline Gumming]; and
there are some others.

The Queen of Roumania, under her nom de
guerre of 'Carmen Sylva,' is the most distin-
guished among living poets who have idealised
the life of Sappho. But her poem under that
title, published in her Sturme, owes more to its
rich poetic charm than to the actual facts of the
Greek story ; in it the Lesbian seems to live in
the Germany of to-day.

Although so little of Sappho remains, her
complete works must have been considerable.
She seems to have been the chief acknowledged
writer of 'Wedding-Songs,' if we may believe
Himerius (cf. fr. 93) ; and there is little doubt
that Catullus' Epithalamia were copied, if not
actually translated, from hers. Menander the
Rhetorician praises her 'Invocatory Hymns,'
in which he says she called upon Artemis
and Aphrodite from a thousand hills ; perhaps
fr. 6 is taken out of one of these. Her hymn
to Artemis is said to have been imitated
by Damophyla (cf. p. 24). She was on all
sides regarded as the greatest erotic poet of

LIFE OF SAPPHO 43

antiquity ; as Swinburne makes her sing of
herself —

My blood was hot wan wine of love,
And my song's sound the sound thereof,
The sound of the delight of it.

Epigrams and Elegies, Iambics and Monodies,
she is also reported to have written. Nine
books of her lyric Odes are said to have ex-
isted, but it is uncertain how they were com-
posed. The imitations of her style and metre
made by Horace are too well known to require
more than a passing reference. Some of his
odes have been regarded as direct translations
from Sappho; notably his Carm. iii. 12, Miser-
arum est nequc amori dare ludum nequc dulci,
which Volger compares to her fr. 90. Horace
looked forward to hearing her in Hades singing
plaintively to the girls of her own country
(Carm. ii. 13, I41), and in his time

Still breathed the love, still lived the fire
To which the Lesbian tuned her lyre.

(Carm. iv. 9. 10.)

1 A quaint mediaeval commentator on Horace, quoted
by Professor Comparetti, says this passage (querentem
Sappho puellis de popularibus) refers to Sappho's com-
plaining, even in Hades, of her Lesbian fellow-maidens
for not loving the youth with whom she was herself so
much in love.

44 LIFE OF SAPPHO

Athenaeus says that Chamaeleon, one of the
disciples of Aristotle, wrote a book about
Sappho; and Strabo says Callias of Lesbos
interpreted her songs. Alexander the Sophist
used to lecture on her; and Dracon of Stra-
tonica, in the reign of Hadrian, wrote a com-
mentary on her metres.

She wrote in the Aeolic dialect, the form of
which Bergk has restored in almost every in-
stance. The absence of rough breathings, the
throwing back of the accent, and the use of the
digamma (F) and of many forms and words
unknown to ordinary Attic Greek, all testify to
this. Three idyls ascribed to Theocritus (cf.
fr. 65) are imitations of the dialect, metre, and
manner of the old Aeolic poets; and the 28th,
says Professor Mahaffy, 'is an elegant little
address to an ivory spindle which the poet was
sending as a present to the wife of his physician
friend, Nikias of Cos, and was probably com-
posed on the model of a poem of Sappho.'

Her poems or jueAH were undoubtedly written
for recitation with the aid of music ; ' they
were, in fact,' to quote Professor Mahaffy again,
'the earliest specimens of what is called in
modern days the Song or Ballad, in which the
repetition of short rhythms produces a certain
pleasant monotony, easy to remember and easy
to understand.'

LIFEOFSAPPHO 45

What Melic poetry like Sappho's actually was
is best comprehended in the light of Plato's
definition of melos, that it is ' compounded out
of three things, speech, music, and rhythm.'

Aristoxenus, as quoted by Plutarch, ascribes
to her the invention of the Mixo-Lydian mode.
Mr. William Chappell thinks the plain mean-
ing of Aristoxenus' assertion is merely that she
sang softly and plaintively, and at a higher
pitch than any of her predecessors. All Greek
modes can be exhibited by means of our
diatonic scale — by the white keys, for example,
omitting the black ones, of our modern piano-
fortes ; the various modes having been merely
divisions of the diatonic scale into certain
regions each consisting of one octave. The
ecclesiastical Mixo-Lydian mode, supposed to
be similar to the Greek mode of the same
name, is the scale of our G major without the
F$ or leading note. It was called in the early
Christian Church 'the angelic mode/ and is
now known as the Seventh of the ecclesiastical
or Gregorian modes. The more celebrated
instances of the use of this mode in modern
church music are Palestrina's four-part motet
Dies sanctificatus, the Antiphon Asperges me as
given in the Roman Gradual, and the Sarum
melody of Sanctorum meritis printed in the
Rev. T. Helmore's Hymnal Noted, The sub-

46 LIFEOFSAPPHO

joined example of it is given in Sir George
Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians : —

r— fr g3_^-g> *"* 1

together with a technical description of its
construction.

Sappho is said by Athenaeus, quoting
Menaechmus and Aristoxenus, to have been
the first of the Greek poets to use the Pektis
(TTHKTUJ), a foreign instrument of uncertain form,
a kind of harp (cf. fr. 122), which was played
by the fingers without a plectrum. Athenaeus
says the Pektis was identical with the Magadis,
but in this he was plainly wrong, for Mr. Wil-
liam Chappell has shown that any instrument
which was played in octaves was called a Maga-
dis, and when it was in the form of a lyre it had
a bridge to divide the strings into two parts,
in the ratio of 2 to i, so that the short part of
each string gave a sound just one octave higher
than the other. Sappho also mentions (in fr.
154) the Baromos or Barmos, and the Sarbitos
or Barbitos, kinds of many-stringed Lesbian
lyres which cannot now be identified.

As to the metres in which Sappho wrote, it
is unnecessary to describe them elaborately
here. They are discussed in all treatises on
Greek or Latin metres, and Neue has treated

LIFE OF SAPPHO 47

of them at great length in his edition of Sappho.
Suffice it to say that Bergk has as far as
possible arranged the fragments according to
their metres, of which I have given indications
— often purposely general — in the headings to
the various divisions. The metre commonly
called after her name was probably not in-
vented by her; it was only called Sapphic
because of her frequent use of it Its strophe
is made up thus :

Professor Robinson Ellis, in the preface to his
translation of Catullus, gives some examples of
Elizabethan renderings of the Sapphic stanza
into English ; but nothing repeats its rhythm to
my ear so well as Swinburne's Sapphics :

All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids,
Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather,
Yet with lips shut close and with eyes of iron
Stood and beheld me.

With such lines as these ringing in the reader's
ears, he can almost hear Sappho herself
singing

Songs that move the heart of the shaken heaven,
Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity,
Hearing, to hear them.

48 LIFE OF SAPPHO

In the face of so much testimony to Sappho's
genius, and in the presence of every glowing
word of hers that has been spared to us, those
'grains of golden sand which the torrent of
Time has carried down to us,' as Professor
F. T. Palgrave says, there is no need for
me to panegyrise the poetess whom the whole
world has been long since contented to hold
without a parallel. What Sappho wrote, to earn
such unchallenged fame, we can only vainly
long to know; what still remains for us to
judge her by, I am willing to leave my readers
to estimate.

I

IN SAPPHIC METRE

TToiKiAo9(ST>v , aedverr' 'A<pp66iTa,
nal AIOQ, 6oAonAoKe, AioooMai ae
JUH fi' aaaiai /HHT* ovicuai bduva,

TiOTvia, 6G(uov

aAAa ruib' e\0', airrora KarepcoTa
rag ejuaq aubcog atoioa TTHAUI

6e 66juov Ainoiaa

' uTTO?eu£aiaa' KaAoi 6t a' afov

orpoOeoi nepi fac MeAaivaq

nuKvo biveuvreq nrep' aTT5 wpcivco ai6e-

paq ciu jiiiaoco.

atya 6' e£iKovTO' TU 6', <S M^Kaipa,
jueibidaaia' aSavotrcp npocscontp,
Hpe', 6m &HUT6 ncnovOa KWTTI

6HUT6 KOAHMl,

KWTTI noi MaAiora GeAco f evesSai
jicuvoAa 6ujacp' riva bHure TTeiGco
you; 5f HV eq sav (piAorara, TIQ c', <L

D

5O SAPPHO

KOI rap ai 9€Ufei, raxeax; 6ia>£ei,
ai 6e 6a>pa HH
at 6e HH <piAei,

KOOUK t9eAoiaa.

eA0e /noi KOI vOv, xaAeirav 6e Auaov
€K nepiuvav, ooau 6e J^LOI reAeaoai

lueppei, reAeaov ou 6' aura
eaao.

Immortal Aphrodite of tJie broidered throne*
daughter of Zeus, weaver of wiles, I pray tfiec
break not my spirit with anguish and distress, O
Queen. But come hither, if ever before thou didst
hear my voice afar, and listen, and leaving thy
father's golden house earnest with chariot yoked,
and fair fleet sparrows drew thee, flapping fast
their wings around the dark earth, from heaven
through mid sky. Quickly arrived they ; and
thou, blessed one, smiling with immortal counte-
nance, didst ask What now is befallen me, and
Why now I call, and What I in my mad heart
most desire to see. c What Beauty now wouldst
thou draw to love thee ? Who wrongs thee,
Sappho ? For even if she flies she shall soon
follow, and if she rejects gifts shall yet give, and
if she loves not shall soon love, however loth?
Come, I pray thee, now too, and release me from
cruel cares ; and all that my heart desires to
accomplish, accomplish thou, and be thyself my
ally.

IN SAPPHIC METRE 51

A HYMN TO VENUS.

O Venus, beauty of the skies,

To whom a thousand temples rise,

Gaily false in gentle smiles,

Full of love-perplexing wiles ;

O goddess, from my heart remove

The wasting cares and pains of love.

If ever thou hast kindly heard
A song in soft distress preferred,
Propitious to my tuneful vow,

0 gentle goddess, hear me now.
Descend, thou bright immortal guest,
In all thy radiant charms confessed.

Thou once didst leave almighty Jove
And all the golden roofs above ;
The car thy wanton sparrows drew,
Hovering in air they lightly flew ;
As to my bower they winged their way

1 saw their quivering pinions play.

The birds dismissed (while you remain)
Bore back their empty car again :
Then you, with looks divinely mild,
In every heavenly feature smiled,
And asked what new complaints I made,
And why I called you to my aid ?

52 SAPPHO

What frenzy in my bosom raged,
And by what cure to be assuaged ?
What gentle youth I would allure.
Whom in my artful toils secure ?
Who does thy tender heart subdue,
Tell me, my Sappho, tell me who ?

Though now he shuns thy longing arms,
He soon shall court thy slighted charms ;
Though now thy offerings he despise,
He soon to thee shall sacrifice ;
Though now he freeze, he soon shall burn,
And be thy victim in his turn.

Celestial visitant, once more
Thy needful presence I implore.
In pity come, and ease my grief,
Bring my distempered soul relief,
Favour thy suppliant's hidden fires,
And give me all my heart desires.

AMBROSE PHILIPS, 1711.

TO THE GODDESS OF LOVE.

O Venus, daughter of the mighty Jove,
Most knowing in the mystery of love,
Help me, oh help me, quickly send relief,
And suffer not my heart to break with grief.

IN SAPPHIC METRE 53

If ever thou didst hear me when I prayed,
Come now, my goddess, to thy Sappho's aid.
Orisons used, such favour hast thou shewn,
From heaven's golden mansions called thee
down.

See, see, she comes in her cerulean car,
Passing the middle regions of the air.
Mark how her nimble sparrows stretch the wing,
And wjth uncommon speed their Mistress bring.

Arrived, and sparrows loosed, hastens to me ;.
Then smiling asks, What is it troubles thee ?
Why am I called ? Tell me what Sappho wants.
Oh, know you not the cause of all my plaints ?

I love, I burn, and only love require ;
And nothing less can quench the raging fire.
What youth, what raving lover shall I gain ?
Where is the captive that should wear my chain?

Alas, poor Sappho, who is this ingrate
Provokes thee so, for love returning hate ?
Does he now fly thee ? He shall soon return ;
Pursue thee, and with equal ardour burn.

Would he no presents at thy hands receive ?
He will repent it, and more largely give.
The force of love no longer can withstand ;
He must be fond, wholly at thy command.

54 SAPPHO

When wilt thou work this change? Now,

Venus free,

Now ease my mind of so much misery j
In this amour my powerful aider be ;
Make Phaon love, but let him love like me.

HERBERT, 1713.

HYMN TO VENUS.

Immortal Venus, throned above
In radiant beauty, child of Jove,
O skilled in every art of love

And artful snare ;

Dread power, to whom I bend the knee,
Release my soul and set it free
From bonds of piercing agony

And gloomy care.
Yet come thyself, if e'er, benign,
Thy listening ears thou didst incline
To my rude lay, the starry shine

Of Jove's court leaving,
In chariot yoked with coursers fair,
Thine own immortal birds that bear
Thee swift to earth, the middle air

With bright wings cleaving.
Soon they were sped — and thou, most blest,
In thine own smiles ambrosial dressed,
Didst ask what griefs my mind oppressed —

What meant my song —

IN SAPPHIC METRE 55

What end my frenzied thoughts pursue —
For what loved youth I spread anew
My amorous nets — ' Who, Sappho, who
' Hath done thee wrong ?

* What though he fly, he 11 soon return —

* Still press thy gifts, though now he spurn ;
' Heed not his coldness — soon hell burn,

' E'en though thou chide.'
— And saidst thou thus, dread goddess ? Oh,

Come then once more to ease my woe :
Grant all, and thy great self bestow,

My shield and guide !

JOHN HERMAN MERIVALE, 1833.

HYMN TO APHRODITE.

Golden-throned beyond the sky,
Jove-born immortality :
Hear and heal a suppliant's pain :
Let not love be love in vain !

Come, as once to Love's imploring
Accents of a maid's adoring,
Wafted 'neath the golden dome
Bore thee from thy father's home ;

When far off thy coming glowed,
Whirling down th' aethereal road,
On thy dove-drawn progress glancing,
'Mid the light of wings advancing ;

56 SAPPHO

And at once the radiant hue
Of immortal smiles I knew ;
Heard the voice of reassurance
Ask the tale of love's endurance : —

* Why such prayer ? And who for thee,
Sappho, should be touch'd by me ;
Passion-charmed in frenzy strong —
Who hath wrought my Sappho wrong ?

' — Soon for flight pursuit wilt find,
Proffer'd gifts for gifts declined ;
Soon, thro' long reluctance earn'd,
Love refused be Love return'd.'

— To thy suppliant so returning,
Consummate a maiden's yearning :
Love, from deep despair set free,
Championing to victory !

F. T. PALGRAVE, 1854.

Splendour-throned Queen, immortal Aphrodite,
Daughter of Jove, Enchantress, I implore thee
Vex not my soul with agonies and anguish ;

Slay me not, Goddess !

Come in thy pity — come, if I have prayed thee ;
Come at the cry of my sorrow ; in the old times
Oft thou hast heard, and left thy father's heaven,

Left the gold houses,
Yoking thy chariot. Swiftly did the doves fly,

IN SAPPHIC METRE 57

Swiftly they brought thee, waving plumes of

wonder —
Waving their dark plumes all across the aether,

All down the azure.
Very soon they lighted. Then didst thou,

Divine one,
Laugh a bright laugh from lips and eyes

immortal,

Ask me, 'What ailed me — wherefore out of
heaven

'Thus I had called thee?
' What it was made me madden in my heart so?'
Question me, smiling — say to me, ' My Sappho,
' Who is it wrongs thee ? Tell me who refuses

' Thee, vainly sighing.'

1 Be it who it may be, he that flies shall follow ;
' He that rejects gifts, he shall bring thee many ;
' He that hates now shall love thee dearly, madly —

' Aye, though thou wouldst not.'
So once again come, Mistress ; and, releasing
Me from my sadness, give me what I sue for,
Grant me my prayer, and be as heretofore now
Friend and protectress.

EDWIN ARNOLD, 1869.

Beautiful-throned, immortal Aphrodite,
Daughter of Zeus, beguiler, I implore thee,
Weigh me not down with weariness and anguish
O thou most holy !

58 SAPPHO

Come to me now, if ever thou in kindness
Hearkenedst my words, — and often hast thou

hearkened —

Heeding, and coming from the mansions golden
Of thy great Father,

Yoking thy chariot, borne by the most lovely
Consecrated birds, with dusky-tinted pinions,
Waving swift wings from utmost heights of
heaven

Through the mid-ether ;

Swiftly they vanished, leaving thee, O goddess,
Smiling, with face immortal in its beauty,
Asking why I grieved, and why in utter longing
I had dared call thee ;

Asking what I sought, thus hopeless in desiring,
Wildered in brain, and spreading nets of

passion —
Alas, for whom ? and saidst thou, ' Who has

harmed thee ?

' O my poor Sappho !

1 Though now he flies, ere long he shall pursue

thee;
'Fearing thy gifts, he too in turn shall bring

them;

' Loveless to-day, to-morrow he shall woo thee,
* Though thou shouldst spurn him.'

IN SAPPHIC METRE 59

Thus seek me now, O holy Aphrodite !
Save me from anguish ; give me all I ask for,
Gifts at thy hand ; and thine shall be the glory,
Sacred protector !

T. W. HIGGINSON, 1871.

O fickle-souled, deathless one, Aphrodite,

Daughter of Zeus, weaver of wiles, I pray thee,
Lady august, never with pangs and bitter
Anguish affray me !

But hither come often, as erst with favour

My invocations pitifully heeding,
Leaving thy sire's golden abode, thou earnest
Down to me speeding.

Yoked to thy car, delicate sparrows drew thee
Fleetly to earth, fluttering fast their pinions,
From heaven's height through middle ether's
liquid

Sunny dominions.

Soon they arrived ; thou, O divine one, smiling
Sweetly from that countenance all immortal,
Askedst my grief, wherefore I so had called thee
From the bright portal ?

What my wild soul languished for, frenzy-
stricken ?

4 Who thy love now is it that ill requiteth,
Sappho ? and who thee and thy tender yearning
Wrongfully slighteth ?

60 SAPPHO

Though he now fly, quickly he shall pursue

thee —
Scorns he thy gifts? Soon he shall freely

offer —

Loves he not ? Soon, even wert thou unwilling,
Love shall he proffer.'

Come to me then, loosen me from my torment,
All my heart's wish unto fulfilment guide

thou,

Grant and fulfil ! And an ally most trusty
Ever abide thou.

MORETON JOHN WALHOUSE, in The
Gentleman's Magazine, 1877.

Glittering-throned, undying Aphrodite,
Wile-weaving daughter of high Zeus, I pray

thee,
Tame not my soul with heavy woe, dread

mistress,
Nay, nor with anguish !

But hither come, if ever erst of old time
Thou didst incline, and listenedst to my crying,
And from thy father's palace down descending,
Camest with golden

Chariot yoked : thee fair swift-flying sparrows
Over dark earth with multitudinous fluttering,
Pinion on pinion, thorough middle ether
Down from heaven hurried.

IN SAPPHIC METRE 6l

Quickly they came like light, and thou, blest

lady,

Smiling with clear undying eyes didst ask me
What was the woe that troubled me, and

wherefore

I had cried to thee :

What thing I longed for to appease my frantic
Soul : and Whom now must I persuade, thou

askedst,

Whom must entangle to thy love, and who now,
Sappho, hath wronged thee ?

Yea, for if now he shun, he soon shall chase

thee;
Yea, if he take not gifts, he soon shall give

them;

Yea, if he love not, soon shall he begin to
Love thee, unwilling.

Come to me now too, and from tyrannous

sorrow

Free me, and all things that my soul desires to
Have done, do for me, queen, and let thyself too
Be my great ally !

J. ADDINGTON SYMONDS, 1893.

Besides these complete versions — many
others there are, but these are by far the best

62 SAPPHO

— compare the following stanza out of Aken-
side's Ode on Lyric Poetry (about 1745) : —

But lo, to Sappho's melting airs

Descends the radiant queen of Love :
She smiles, and asks what fonder cares

Her suppliant's plaintive measures move :
Why is my faithful maid distressed ?
Who, Sappho, wounds thy tender breast ?
Say, flies he ? — Soon he shall pursue.

Shuns he thy gifts ? — He soon shall give.

Slights he thy sorrows ? — He shall grieve,
And soon to all thy wishes bow.

And Swinburne's paraphrase —

For I beheld in sleep the light that is
In her high place in Paphos, heard the kiss
Of body and soul that mix with eager tears
And laughter stinging through the eyes and

ears:

Saw Love, as burning flame from crown to feet,
Imperishable, upon her storied seat ;
Clear eyelids lifted toward the north and south,
A mind of many colours, and a mouth
Of many tunes and kisses ; and she bowed,
With all her subtle face laughing aloud,
Bowed down upon me, saying, 'Who doth

thee wrong,
Sappho ? ' but thou — thy body is the song,

IN SAPPHIC METRE 63

Thy mouth the music ; thou art more than I,
Though my voice die not till the whole world

die;
Though men that hear it madden ; though love

weep,
Though nature change, though shame be

charmed to sleep.

Ay, wilt thou slay me lest I kiss thee dead ?
Yet the queen laughed from her sweet heart

and said :

' Even she that flies shall follow for thy sake,
And she shall give thee gifts that would not take,
Shall kiss that would not kiss thee ' (yea, kiss me)
' When thou wouldst not ' — when I would not

kiss thee !

Anactoria, p. 67 £

And his —

O tJiou of divers-coloured mind,1 O thou
Deathless^ God's daughter subtle-souled — lo now,
Now to the song above all songs, in flight
Higher than the day-star's height,
And sweet as sound the moving wings of night !
Thou of the divers-coloured seat — behold
Her very song of old ! —

O deathless, O God's daughter subtle-souled I
*****

1 TioiKiA69povJ = on richly worked throne, is by some
read noiKiA6<ppov = full of various wiles, subtle-minded.

64 SAPPHO

Child of God, close craftswoman, I beseech thee ;
Bid not ache nor agony break nor master,
Lady, my spirit.

Songs of the Spring-tides: On the Cliffs.

As well as Frederick Tennyson's —

Come to me ; what I seek in vain
Bring thou ; into my spirit send
Peace after care, balm after pain ;
And be my friend.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing at Rome
about 25 B.C., quotes this, commonly called
The Ode to Aphrodite, as a perfect illustration
of the elaborately finished style of poetry,
showing in detail how its grace and beauty lie
in the subtle harmony between the words and
the ideas. Certain lines of it, though nowhere
else the whole, are preserved by Hephaestion
and other authors.

2

<t>aiveral »AOI KHVOC Too<; 9eoioiv
a>vHp, OSTIQ evavrioc TOI

Udvei, Kai nAaaiov a&u <pa>V€u-

oac UTTCtKOuei

Kai reAaiaac iMepoev, TO jmoi judv
Kapbiav ev OTHGeaiv errroaoev
ax; rap euibov 3poxeo><; ae,

oubev cr5

IN SAPPHIC METRE 65

KOM juev fAwoaa eotfe, Aenrov I'

onnareGat b' oubev opHjn', enippoju-

Peioi 6' aKOuai.

a be MiSp^C KaKxterat, Tpojioq 6e
natoav afpei, x^^pOTepa 6e noiaq
eMMi, TeGvaKHv 6' oAifco 'ntbeuHQ

^aivoMai [aAAa].
aAAa nav TO\)HUTOV, [enei KQI nevHTa].

That man seems to me peer of gods, who sits
in thy presence \ and hears close to him thy sweet
speech and lovely laughter ; that indeed makes
my heart flutter in my bosom. For when I see
thee but a little, I have no utterance left, my
tongue is broken down, and straightway a subtle
fire has run under my skin, with my eyes I have
no sight, my ears ring, sweat pours down, and a
trembling seizes all my body ; I am paler than
grass, and seem in my madness little better t/ian
one dead. But I must dare all, since one so
poor . . .

The famous imitation of this ode by Catullus,
li., Ad Lesbiam —

Ille mi par esse deo videtur,
Ille, si fas est, superare divos,
Qui sedens adversus identidem te
Spectat et audit
E

66 SAPPHO

Dulce ridentem, misero quod omnis
Eripit sensus mihi : nam simul te,

Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi

* # * * *

Lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus
Flamma demanat, sonitu suopte
Tintinant aures, gemina teguntur
Lumina nocte —

is thus translated by Mr. W. E. Gladstone : —

Him rival to the gods I place,

Him loftier yet, if loftier be, •
Who, Lesbia, sits before thy face,

Who listens and who looks on thee ;

Thee smiling soft. Yet this delight
Doth all my sense consign to death ;

For when thou dawnest on my sight,
Ah, wretched ! flits my labouring breath.

My tongue is palsied. Subtly hid

Fire creeps me through from limb to limb

My loud ears tingle all unbid :

Twin clouds of night mine eyes bedim.

arid recently by the late Sir R. F. Burton : —

Peer of a god meseemeth he,
Nay, passing gods (an that can be !),
Who all the while sits facing thee,
Sees thee and hears

IN SAPPHIC METRE 6?

Thy low sweet laughs which (ah me !) daze
Mine every sense, and as I gaze
Upon thee, Lesbia. o'er me strays

My tongue is dulled, my limbs adown
Flows subtle flame ; with sound its own
Rings either ear, and o'er are strown
Mine eyes with night.

Blest as the immortal gods is he,
The youth who fondly sits by thee,
And hears and sees thee all the while
Softly speak and sweetly smile.

'Twas this deprived my soul of rest,
And raised such tumults in my breast ;
For while I gazed, in transport tost,
My breath was gone, my voice was lost

My bosom glowed ; the subtle flame
Ran quick through all my vital frame ;
O'er my dim eyes a darkness hung;
My ears with hollow murmurs rung.

In dewy damps my limbs were chilled ;
My blood with gentle horror thrilled ;
My feeble pulse forgot to play j
I tainted, sank, and died away.

AMBROSE PHILIPS, 1711.

68 SAPPHO

Thy fatal shafts unerring move,
I bow before thine altar, Love
I feel thy soft resistless flame
Glide swift through ail my vital frame.

For while I gaze my bosom glows,
My blood in tides impetuous flows ;
Hope, fear, and joy alternate roll,
And floods of transports whelm my soul.

My faltering tongue attempts in vain
In soothing murmurs to complain ;
My tongue some secret magic ties,
My murmurs sink in broken sighs.

Condemned to nurse eternal care,
And ever drop the silent tear,
Unheard I mourn, unknown I sigh,
Unfriended live, unpitied die.

SMOLLETT, in Roderick Random^ 1748.

Blest as the immortal gods is he,

The youth whose eyes may look on thee,

Whose ears thy tongue's sweet melody

May still devour.

Thou smilest too? — sweet smile, whose charm
Has struck my soul with wild alarm,
And, when I see thee, bids disarm

Each vital power.

IN SAPPHIC METRE 69

Speechless I gaze : the flame within
Runs swift o'er all my quivering skin ;
My eyeballs swim ; with dizzy din

My brain reels round j
And cold drops fall ; and tremblings frail
Seize every limb ; and grassy pale
I grow ; and then — together fail

Both sight and sound.
JOHN HERMAN MERIVALE, 1833.

Peer of gods he seemeth to me, the blissful
Man who sits and gazes at thee before him,
Close beside thee sits, and in silence hears thee

Silverly speaking,

Laughing love's low laughter. Oh this, this only
Stirs the troubled heart in my breast to tremble !
For should I but see thee a little moment,

Straight is my voice hushed ;
Yea, my tongue is broken, and through and

through me

'Neath the flesh impalpable fire runs tingling ;
Nothing see mine eyes, and a noise of roaring

Waves in my ear sounds ;
Sweat runs down in rivers, a tremor seizes
All my limbs, and paler than grass in autumn,
Caught by pains of menacing death, I falter,

Lost in the love-trance.

J. ADDINGTON SYMONDS, 1883.

7O SAPPHO

Compare Lord Tennyson : —

I watch thy grace ; and in its place
My heart a charmed slumber keeps,

While I muse upon thy face ;
And a languid fire creeps

Through my veins to all my frame,
Dissolvingly and slowly : soon

From thy rose-red lips my name
Floweth ; and then, as in a swoon,
With dinning sound my ears are rife,
My tremulous tongue faltereth,
I lose my colour, I lose my breath,
I drink the cup of a costly death
Brimmed with delicious draughts of warmest

life.
I die with my delight, before

I hear what I would hear from thee.

Elednore, 1832.
And—

Last night, when some one spoke his name,
From my swift blood that went and came
A thousand little shafts of flame
Were shiver'd in my narrow frame. — Fatima.1

1 When Fatima. was first published (1832) this motto
was prefixed —

4>a(verai uoi KHVOC taoc Seotoiv
"uuev avHp,

showing Tennyson's acknowledgments to Sappho.

IN SAPPHIC METRE /I

And with line 14, Swinburne's —

Paler than grass in summer. — Sapphics.

and —

Made like white summer-coloured grass.

Aholibah.

Longinus, about 250 A.D., uses this, The Ode
to Anactoria, or To a beloved Woman, or To a
Maiden, as tradition variously names it, to
illustrate the perfection of the Sublime in
poetry, calling it ' not one passion, but a con-
gress of passions,' and showing how Sappho
had here seized upon the signs of love-frenzy
and harmonised them into faultless phrase.
Plutarch had, about 60 A.D., spoken of this ode
as ' mixed with fire,' and quoted Philoxenus as
referring to Sappho's ' sweet-voiced songs heal-
ing love.'

oe\avvav
aty unuKpunroiai cpdevvov eI5o<;,
SimoTa n\H6oica naAiora AUJUTTH
fav [firi iracav]

The stars about the fair moon in their turn
hide their bright face when she at about her full
lights up all earth with silver.

72 SAPPHO

Planets, that around the beauteous moon
Attendant wait, cast into shade

Their ineffectual lustre, soon
As she, in full-orbed majesty arrayed,

Her silver radiance pours

Upon this world of ours.

J. H. MERIVALE.

The stars around the lovely moon
Their radiant visage hide as soon
As she, full-orbed, appears to sight,
Flooding the earth with her silvery light.

? FELTON.

The stars about the lovely moon
Fade back and vanish very soon,
When, round and full, her silver face
Swims into sight, and lights all space.

EDWIN ARNOLD, 1869.

Stars that shine around the refulgent full moon
Pale, and hide their glory of lesser lustre
When she pours her silvery plenilunar „
Light on the orbed earth.

J. A. SYMONDS, 1883.

' As the stars draw back their shining faces
when they surround the fair moon in her silver
fulness.' F. T. PALGRAVE.

IN SAPPHIC METRE 73

Quoted by Eustathius of Thessalonica, late
in the twelfth century, to illustrate the simile in
the Iliad, viii. 551 : —

As when in heaven the stars about the moon
Look beautiful. TENNYSON.

Julian, about 350 A.D., says Sappho applied
the epithet silver to the moon ; wherefore
Blomfield suggested its position here.

i' uobcov

juctAivcov, aiGuoaojutvwv 5e <puAAcov
KO>MO Kcrrappei

And round about the [breeze] murmurs cool
through apple-boughs, and slumber streams from
quivering leaves.

Through orchard-plots with fragrance crowned
The clear cold fountain murmuring flows ;

And forest leaves with rustling sound
Invite to soft repose.

J. H. MERIVALE.

All around through branches of apple-orchards
Cool streams call, while down from the leaves
a-tremble

Slumber distilleth.

J. A. SYMONDS, 1883.

74 SAPPHO

Professor F. T. Palgrave says : —
' We have three lines on a garden scene full
of the heat and sleep of the fortunate South : —

' " Round about the cool water thrills through
the apple-branches, and sleep flows down upon
us in the rustling leaves."

'If there were any authority,' he adds in a
note, ' I should like to translate " through the
troughs of apple- wood." That Eastern mode of
garden irrigation gives a much more denned,
and hence a more Sappho-like, image than
"through the boughs.'"

From the sound of cool waters heard through
the green boughs

Of the fruit-bearing trees,
And the rustling breeze,
Deep sleep, as a trance, down over me flows.
FREDERICK TENNYSON, 1 890.

Cited by Hermogenes, about 170 A.D.. as
an example of simple style, and to show the
pleasure given by description. The fragment
describes the gardens of the nymphs, which
Demetrius, about 150 A.D., says were sung by
Sappho. Cf. Theocritus, Idyl vii. 135: 'High
above our heads waved many a poplar, many
an elm-tree, while close at hand the sacred
water from the Nymph's own cave welled forth

IN SAPPHIC METRE 75

with murmurs musical ' (A. Lang). And Ovid,
Her oid., xv. 157 —

A spring there is whose silver waters show, etc. —

(cf. Pope's translation, infra, p. 194) probably
refers to it.

Kutrpi

ev KuAiKeaaiv afJpox;
aujujuemrnevov eaAiaiai veiorap
oivoxoeuaa.

Come, goddess of Cyprus, and in golden cups
serve nectar delicately mixed with delights.

Come, Venus, come
Hither with thy golden cup,

Where nectar-floated flowerets swim.
Fill, fill the goblet up ;

These laughing lips shall kiss the brim, —
Come, Venus, come !

ANON. (Edin. Rev., 1832).

Kupris, hither

Come, and pour from goblets of gold the nectar
Mixed for love's and pleasure's delight with
dainty

Joys of the banquet.

J. A. SYMONDS, 1883.

76 SAPPHO

Athenaeus, a native of Naucratis, who flour-
ished about 230 A.D., quotes these verses as
an example of the poets' custom of invoking
Aphrodite in their pledges. Applying them to
himself and his fellow-guests, he adds the words
TOUTOKH role ercupou; CMOIC re KOI ooiq. Some
scholars believe that Sappho actually wrote —

rmobe TCUC ejumc crapmoi Kai
For these my companions and thine.

Aphrodite was called Cypris, ' the Cyprian,' be-
cause it was mythologically believed that when
she rose from the sea she was first received as
a goddess on the shore of Cyprus (Homeric
ffymns, vi.). Sappho seems to be here figura-
tively referring to the nectar of love.

"H oe Konpoc xai

Or Cyprus and Paphos, or Panormus [holds]
thu.

If thee Cyprus, or Paphos, or Panormos.
J. A. SYMONDS, 1883.

From Strabo, about 19 A.D. Panormus
(Palermo) in Sicily was not founded till after

IN SAPPHIC METRE 77

Sappho's time, but it was a common name, and
all seaports were under the special protection
of Aphrodite.

7,8

Sol 5' er&> AeuKaQ eni 3a>jnov aIf(K

rot ^ w — w — v-

But for thee will I [lead] to /&? altar [the off-
spring] 0/" a white goat . . . and add a libation
for thee.

Adduced by Apollonius of Alexandria,
about 140 A.D., to illustrate similarities in dia-
lects. The fragment is probably part of an ode
describing a sacrifice offered to Aphrodite.

Ai8' erc

rovbe TOV naXov

This lot may I win, golden-crowned Aphrodite .

From Apollonius, to show how adverbs give
an idea of prayer.

78 SAPPHO

IO

Ai ue Tijuiav enoHGav
TO o<pa 5oioau

Who gave me their gifts and made me honoiired.

From Apollonius, to illustrate the Aeolic dia-
lect. Bergk thinks this fragment had some
connection with fr. 68, and perhaps with fr. 32.
Tt seems to refer to the Muses.

II

— w — w — Td5e vuv e

TOU; ejLKuot repnva KaAux; aeiao).

This will I now sing deftly to please my girl-
friends.

Quoted by Athenaeus to prove that freeborn
women and maidens often called their girl
associates and friends ermpai (Hetaerae), with-
out any idea of reproach.

IN SAPPHIC METRE 79

12

- v — w — w w "Omvoc rap
eu 6eu), KHVOI jne MaAiGTCi aivvov-

TCU. w w - w.

whom I benefit injure me most.

From the Etymologicum Magm/m, a diction-
ary which was compiled about the tenth
century A.D.

13

— w — w — w"Ef^ &e KHV' OT-
TOJ TH epcrrcu.

But that which one desires / . . .

From Apollonius, to illustrate the use of the
verb tpaw. Bergk now reads eparai instead of
tpfirai as formerly, on the analogy of &IOKHTUI
and OUVOMOI in tne i'ayum fragments.

80 SAPPHO

H

Talc K(i\aiq u/mmv [TO] voH^ia TO>UOV
OL 6ici)Lieiirrov.

To you, fair maids, my mind changes not.

From Apollonius, to show the Aeolic use of
for UJLUV, ' to you.'

15

— w — w — w"Ercov 6' t
TOUTO ouvoiba.

And this I feel in myself.
From Apollonius, to show Aeolic accentuation.

16

TOUCH [6e] \j/C)(poq (uiev efevro 9u/noc,
nap 6' icioi TO trrepa. — w — w

But their heart turned cold and they dropt
their wings,

In Pindar, Pyth. i. 10, the eagle of Zeus,
delighted by music, drops his wings, and the
Scholiast quotes this fragment to show that
Sappivo says the same of doves.

8i

— w — w — v KOT9 ijuov
Tbv 6 eniTTAa^ovreg ajuoi <ptpoiev
Km ue/\e5cbvaiQ.

According to my weeping : it and all cart let
buffeting winds bear away.

Him the wanderer o'er the world
Far away the winds will bear,
And restless care.

FREDERICK TENNYSON.

From the Etymologicum Magnum, to show
that the Aeolians used ? in the place of aa.
Ajuoi is a guess of Bergk's for avejuoi, ' winds.'

18

'Ap-na>c u' a xpuooTT
Me just now the golden-sandalled Dawn . . .

Me but now Aurora the golden-sandalled.
J. A. SYMONDS, 1883.

Quoted by Ammonius of Alexandria, at the
close of the fourth century A.D., to show Sappho's
use of aprioq.

F

82 SAPPHO

19

w — w w TTo&ac 64
(uuioXm; eKaXuirre, AO&i-
ov KaAov epfov.

A broidered strap of fair Lydian work covered
her feet.

Quoted by the Scholiast on Aristophanes'
Peace, 1174 ; and also by Pollux, about 180 A.D.
Blass thinks the lines may have referred to an
apparition of Aphrodite.

2O

— - w — w TTavro&anau;
va xpotaiotv.

Shot with a thousand hues.

Quoted by the Scholiast on Apollonius of
Rhodes, i. 727, in speaking of Jason's double-
folded mantle having been reddish instead of
flame-coloured Some think, however, that
Sappho here refers to Iris, i.e. the rainbow.

IN SAPPHIC METRE 83

21

.... "EjueSev b' tyeiaQa Ad6av
Me thouforgettest.

From Apollonius, as is also the following, to
show the Aeolic use of lMe6ev for enou, ' of me.'

22

— w — w — ww"H Tlv' oAAov
[juoAAov] avGpconcov tjueQev <piAH00a.

d?r lovest another more than me.

23

Ou TI M

Ye are nought to me.

Quoted by Apollonius, as is also the following
fragment, to show that ujneu; was in Aeolic
'you.'

84 SAPPHO

24

AC GeAer' Guuec.
While ye will.

25

Kai TTOGHCO KOI uao.ucu w — w
I yearn and seek . . .

From the Etymologicum Magnum, to show
that the Aeolians used noetico for noeeco,
'I yearn.'

26

Kelvov, <5 xPu°o6p°ve MoCo',
UMVOV, eK rag KaAAipJvaiKoc c
Tmog x^P0"^ ov aeibe
afauoq.

C? Muse of the golden throne, raise that strain
which the reverend elder of Teos, from the goodly
land of fair women, used to sing so sweetly.

IN SAPPHIC METRE 85

O Muse, who sitt'st on golden throne,
Full many a hymn of dulcet tone

The Teian sage is taught by thee ;
But, goddess, from thy throne of gold,
The sweetest hymn thou 'st ever told

He lately learned and sang for me.

T. MOORE.

Athenaeus says ' Hermesianax was mistaken
when he represented Sappho and Anacreon as
contemporaries, for Anacreon lived in the time
of Cyrus and Polycrates [probably 563-478 B.C.],
but Sappho lived in the reign of Alyattes the
father of Croesus. But Chamaeleon, in his
treatise on Sappho, asserts that according to
some these verses were made upon her by
Anacreon : —

" Spirit of Love, whose tresses shine
Along the breeze in golden twine,
Come, within a fragrant cloud
Blushing with light, thy votary shroud,
And on those wings that sparkling play
Waft, oh waft me hence away !
Love, my soul is full of thee,
Alive to all thy luxury.

86 SAPPHO

But she, the nymph for whom I glow.
The pretty Lesbian, mocks my woe,
Smiles at the hoar and silvery hues
Which Time upon my forehead strews.

Alas, I fear she keeps her charms
In store for younger, happier arms."'

T. MOOUE.

Then follows Sappho's reply, the present
fragment. 'I myself think,' Athenaeus goes
on to say, 'that Hermesianax is joking con-
cerning the love of Anacreon and Sappho, for
Diphilus the comic poet, in his play called
Sappho, has represented Archilochus and Hip-
ponax as the lovers of Sappho.'

Probably the whole is spurious, for certainly
Sappho never saw Anacreon : she must have
died before he was born. Even Athenaeus
says that it is clear to every one that the verses
are not Sappho's.

IN DACTYLIC METRE 8/

27

ev OTH6eaiv opra<;
rAcboaav

When anger spreads through the breast, guard
thy tongue from barking idly.

When through thy breast wild wrath doth spread

And work thy inmost being harm,
Leave thou the fiery word unsaid,
Guard thee ; be calm.

MICHAEL FIELD, 1889.

Quoted by Plutarch, in his treatise On
restraining anger, to show that in wrath nothing
is more noble than quietness. Blass thinks
that Bergk is wrong in his restoration of the
verses; he considers their metre choriambic
(like fr. 64, ff.), and reads them thus :

1 * OKi&vajievag orneeoiv oprac necpuAarMeva (?)
rAaxjcav

He compares fr. 72 with them.

88 SAPPHO

III

IN ALCAIC METRE
28

Ai 6* fixec eoXwv tjuepov H KciAcov,
KCti UH TI FeiiTHv fAoiaa' eia/Ka KCXKOV,
aI6co<; Kt a' ou Ki^avev
d\\' eAefec nepi TCO

Hadst thoufelt desire for things good or noble,
and hud not thy tongue framed some evil speech,
shame had not filled thine eyes, but thou hadst
spoken honestly about it.

THE LOVES OF SAPPHO AND ALCAEUS.

Alcaeus. — I fain would speak, I fain would tell,
But shame and fear my utterance

quell.
Sappho. — If aught of good, if aught of fair

Thy tongue were labouring to declare,
Nor shame should dash thy glance,

nor fear

Forbid thy suit to reach my ear.
ANON. (Edin. Rev., 1832, p. 190).

IN ALCAIC METRE 89

Aristotle, in his Rhetoric, i. 9, about 330 B.C,
says 'base things dishonour those who do or
wish them, as Sappho showed when Alcaeus
said —

IOTTAOK' eifva ueMixopei&e £011901,
GtAo) TI FeiiTHV, oAAu fie KaUuei ai'6a>c

'; Violet-weaving, pure, softly-smiling Sappho, I
•would say something, but shame restrains me"'
(cf. supra, p. 8), and she answered him in the
words of the present fragment.

Blass (Rhein. Mus. 1879, xxix. p. 150)
believes that these verses also are Sappho's,
not Alcaeus'. Certainly they were quoted as
Sappho's by Anna Comnena, about 1 1 10 A.D.,
as well as by another writer whom Blass refers
to. Blass would read the last line ncpi <2> biKaiux;
('6iKaicoc) = nepi ou ebiKcuoug, about that which thou
didst pretend.

IV

IN MIXED GLYCONIC AND
ALCAIC METRE

29

Zja6i KOVTO cpiAog ....

Kai rav erf osaoic auneraoov x«Plv-

Stand face to face, friend . . . and unveil
the grace in thine eyes.

9O SAPPHO

Athenaeus, speaking of the charm of lovers'
eyes, says Sappho addressed this to a man who
was admired above all others for his beauty.
Bergk thinks it may have formed part of an
ode to Phaon (cf. fr. 140), or of a bridal song ;
and A. Schoene suspects that it was possibly
addressed to Sappho's brother. The metre is
quite uncertain.

V
IN CHORIAMBIC METRE

[This is a very unsatisfactory category. Some of the
fragments, e.g. 30-43, are in Aeolian dactyls, wherein
the second foot is always a dactyl ; 44-49 are Glyconics ;
50-54 are in the Ionic a majors metre ; some others are
Asclepiads, etc. But where so much is uncertain, it
seems to be the simplest way to group them thus.]

30

XpUOeOl 6' €p€plV00l tTT* filOVCOV €9UOVTO.

And golden pulse grew on the shores.

Quoted by Athenaeus, when he is speaking
of vetches.

IN CHORIAMBIC METRE 91

31

Aorro) KQI Niopa MctAa juev 91X01 HOOV eraipau

Leto and Niobe were friends full dear.

Quoted by Athenaeus for the same reason
as fr. ii. Compare also fr. 143.

32

Mvc'iceoQai Ttvci cpajat Kal uarepov aujuecov.
Men I think will remember us even hereafter.

Compare Swinburne's —

Thou art more than I,

Though my voice die not till the whole world
die.

and —

Memories shall mix and metaphors of me.
and —

I Sappho shall be one with all these things,
With all high things for ever.

Anactoria.

92 SAPPHO

Dio Chrysostom, the celebrated Greek rhe-
torician, writing about 100 A.D., observes that
Sappho says this ' with perfect beauty.'

To illustrate this use of <pam, Bergk quotes
a fragment preserved by Plutarch, which may
have been written by Sappho :

lOTTAOKCOV

Moiaav eu

/ think I ham a goodly portion in the violet
weaving Muses.

33

Hpduav uev era> oeGev, "ArSi, ird\ai ITOTO.
I loved thee once, Atthis, long ago.

I loved thee, — hark, one tenderer note than all —
Atthis, of old time, once — one low long fall,
Sighing — one long low lovely loveless call,
Dying — one pause in song so flamelike fast —
A tikis, long since in old time overpast —
One soft first pause and last.
One, — then the old rage of rapture's fieriest rain
Storms all the music-maddened night again.
SWINBURNE, Songs of the Springtides, p. 57.

IN CHORIAMBIC METRE 93

Quoted by Hephaestion, about 150 A.D., as
an example of metre. The verse stood at the
beginning of the first ode of the second book
of Sappho's poems, which Hephaestion says
was composed entirely of odes in this metre:
thus,

34

noi -naiq, ejujuev ^aiveo

A slight and ill-favoured child didst thou seem
to me.

Quoted by Plutarch ; and by others also.

Bergk thinks it is certain that this fragment
belongs to the same poem as does the pre-
ceding, judging from references to it by
Terentianus Maurus, about 100 A.D., and by
Marius Victorinus, about 350 A.D.

35

AAAa, JHH nej-a\uveo baicruAia) nepu
Foolish woman, pride not thyself on a ring.

Preserved by Herodian the grammarian,
who lived about 160 A.D.

94 SAPPHO

36

OUK 016' OTTI Gear 6u) juoi TO voHjaara.
/ know not what to do ; my mind is divided.

Quoted by the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus,
about 220 B.C.

37

6* ct &OKIJUOIM' opdvco 6uai

I do not think to touch the sky with my two
arms.

Quoted by Herodian. Cf. Horace, Carm.
I. i. 36, Sublimi feriam sidera vertice^ —

My head, exalted so, will touch the stars,

which some think a direct translation of this
line of Sappho's.

Old Horace ? ' I will strike,' said he,
' The stars with head sublime.'

TENNYSON, Tiresias, 1885.

IN CHORIAMBIC METRE 95

38

QC 6e irate ne&o uarepa Treirreptroowai.
y^m/ I flutter like a child after her mother.

Like a child whose mother 's lost,
I am fluttering, terror-tost.

M. J. WALHOUSE.

After my mother I flew like a bird.

FREDERICK TENNYSON.

Quoted in the Etymologicum Magnum as an
example of Aeolic. It may have related to a
sparrow, and been imitated by Catullus, 3, 6 ff. :

Sweet, all honey : a bird that ever hailed her
Lady mistress, as hails the maid a mother.
Nor would move from her arms away : but only
Hopping round her, about her, hence or hither
Piped his colloquy, piped to none beside her.

ROBINSON ELLIS.

39

*Hpo<; arreAoc tjuepocpamx; aHbcov.
Spring's messenger, the sweet-voiced nightingale.

96 SAPPHO

The dear good angel of the spring,
The nightingale.

BEN JONSON, The Sad Shepherd, Act ii.

The tawny sweetwinged thing
Whose cry was but of Spring.

SWINBURNE, Songs of the Springtides,

p. 52.

Quoted by the Scholiast on Sophocles,
Electra, 149, ' the nightingale is the messenger
of Zeus, because it is the sign of Spring.'

40

Epoq boOre ji' b AuaijueAm; bovei,
rAuKUTTtKpov ajiidxavcv opnerov.

Now Love masters my limbs and shakes me,
fatal creature, bitter-sweet.

Lo, Love once more, the limb-dissolving King,
The bitter-sweet impracticable thing,
Wild-beast-like rends me with fierce quivering.

J. ADDINGTON SYMONDS, 1883.

IN CHORIAMBIC METRE 97

Compare —

O Love, Love, Love ! O withering might !
TENNYSON, Fatima.

O bitterness of things too sweet !

SWINBURNE, Fragoletta.

Sweet Love, that art so bitter.

SWINBURNE, Tristram of Lyonesse.

and the song in Bothwell, act i. sc. i : —

Surely most bitter of all sweet things thou art,
And sweetest thou of all things bitter, love.

Quoted by Hephaestion. Cf. fr. 125.

41

i, ool b' €jue9tv jiev arm

9pOVTl<5&HV, €TTt 6' * AvbpOJUcbaV TTOTH.

But to thee, Atthis, the thought of me is hate-
ful ; thouflittest to Andromeda.

Quoted by Hephaestion together with fr. 40,
but it seems to be the beginning of a different
ode.

G

98 SAPPHO

42

"EpoQ 6auiJ rrivafcev Ijnoi <ppeva<;,
avejuoq KCiT5 opog bpuoiv ejuneocov.

Now Eros shakes my soul, a wind on the
mountain jailing on the oaks.

Love shook me like the mountain breeze
Rushing down on the forest trees.

FREDERICK TENNYSON.

Lo, Love once more my soul within me rends,
Like wind that on the mountain oak descends.
J. A. SYMONDS, 1883.

Quoted by Maximus Tyrius, about 1 50 B.C.,
in speaking of Socrates exciting Phaedrus to
Bacchic frenzy when he talked of love.

43

"Ora ndvvuxoc ao<pi Kararpei.
When all night long [sleep] holds their [eyes'.

Quoted by Apollonius to show the Aeolic
form of 091. Bergk thinks that Sappho may
have written —

OTTTTCIT' [ucopoq],
OTO navvuxoc ao<pt Kcrrarpei,

therefore I translate it so.

IN CHORIAMBIC METRE 99

44

XeipoMctKTpa be KQJTOVCOV
nop(pupa ....
KOI raura n'ev a
enenv' emu 4>coKaac
&a>pa Tijuia Karrovcov.

And purple napkins for thy lap . . . (even
these wilt thou despise) I sent from Phocaea,
preaous gifts for thy lap.

Quoted by Athenaeus out of the fifth book
of Sappho's Songs to Aphrodite, to show that
XeipoMOKTpa were cloths, handkerchiefs, for
covering the head. But the whole passage is
hopelessly corrupt.

45

"Ape &H xeAu Ma jaoi
fevoio.

Come nmu, divine shell, become vocal for me.

Quoted by Hermogenes and Eustathius, of
Sappho apostrophising her lyre.

100 SAPPHO

46

KairaAaiq u

OJLIIT' airaAa 6epa.

And tender woven garlands round tender neck.
From Athenaeus.

47

Fonder of maids tJian Gello.

Quoted as a proverb by Zenobius, about 130
A.D. j said of those who die an untimely death,
or of those whose indulgence brings ruin on
their children. Gello was a maiden who died
in youth, whose ghost, the Lesbians said, pur-
sued children and carried them off.

IN CHORIAMBIC METRE IOI

48

MciAa bit

Of Gorge full weary.

I am weary of all thy words and soft strange
ways.

SWINBURNE, Anactoria.

Quoted by Choeroboscus, about the end of
the sixth century A.D., to show that the Aeolic
genitive ended in -cue. Maximus Tyrius men-
tions this girl Gorgo along with Andromeda
(cf. fr. 41) as beloved by Sappho.

49

BpevGeuo
Of a proud (or perfumed, or flowery) palace,

Athenaeus says Sappho here mentions the
' royal ' and the ' brentheian ' unguent together,
as if they were one and the same thing ; but
the reading is very uncertain.

102 SAPPHO

50

Efco 6' eiri na\QaK.av
anoAeco jueAea.

But I upon a soft cushion dispose my limbs.
From Herodian.

51

KH 6' aMPpooiag ^ev Kpamp eKCKparo,
' Epjuug 6' eAev oAmv Oeoiq oivoxoHaai.
KHVOI 6' apa iravrec KapxHOid T* fi)(ov
KaAeigov, apdoavTO 6e ndjunav eaAa
TCO

And there t/ie bowl of ambrosia was mixed, cuid
Hermes took the ladle to pour out for the gods ,
and then they all held goblets, and made libation,
and wished the bridegroom all good hick.

The first two lines are quoted by Athenaeus
to show that in Sappho Hermes was cupbearer
to the gods ; and in another place he quotes the

IN CHORIAMBIC METRE 103

rest to illustrate her mention of carchesia, cups
narrow in the middle, with handles reaching
from the top to the bottom. Lachmann first
joined the two fragments. The verses appear
to belong to the Epithalamia.

52

Ae&uxe M'EV a oeAawa
Kai TTAHta&eq, Mtoai be
VUKTCQ, napa 5' epx^r' a>pa,
tfco 5e juova

The moon has set, and the Pleiades ; it is mid-
night, the time is going by, and I sleep alone.

The silver moon is set ;

The Pleiades are gone ;
Half the long night is spent, and yet

I lie alone. J. H. MERIVALE.

The moon hath left the sky ;

Lost is the Pleiads' light ;

It is midnight
And time slips by ;
But on my couch alone I lie.

J. A. SYMONDS, 1883.

Quoted by Hephaestion as an example of
metre.

104 SAPPHO

53

juev V<paiveiJ a ceAavva,
ai 5' cl)c nepi (Joojuov eoraGHaav.

The moon rose full, and the women stood as
though around an altar.

Quoted by Hephaestion as an example of
Praxilleian verses, i.e. such as the Sicyonian
poetess Praxilla (about B.C. 450) wrote in the
metre known as the Ionic a majore trimeter
brachycatalectic. Blass thinks that the lines are
part of the same poem as that to which the
succeeding fragment belongs.

54

Kpfloaai vu nor3 oo>6' eMjueXeax no&eoaiv
d>pXeGvT> anaXoic ajLUp' epoevra PCOJUOV
noaQ repev av9oq juaAaKov M«Teioai.

Thus at times with tender feet the Cretan
women dance in measure round the fair altar,
trampling the fine soft bloom of the grass.

IN CHORIAMBIC METRE 105

Mr. Moreton J. Walhouse thus combines the
previous fragment with this : —

Then, as the broad moon rose on high,
The maidens stood the altar nigh ;
And some in graceful measure

The well-loved spot danced round,
With lightsome footsteps treading
The soft and grassy ground.

Quoted by Hephaestion as an example of
metre, vv. i and 2 in one place and v. 3 in
another ; Bergk says Santen first joined them.

55

"Appa &HUT6 naxiia cnoAa a
Then delicately in thick robe I sprang.

From Herodian, as an illustration of the
Aeolic dialect. Bergk attributes this to Sappho,
but Cramer and others think that Alcaeus wrote
the line.

106 SAPPHO

56

4>aioi &H TTOTO AH&OV uciKiveivcov
[On* av6eoov] nenuKa6juevov
eupHV a>iov.

Leda they say once found an egg hidden under
hyacinth-blossoms.

From the Etymologicum Magnum, Athenaeus,
and others. Bergk thinks fr. 112 may be con-
tinuous with this, thus —

<x>ov )o>
TTO\U \euKorepov — w ^ — w —

since Athenaeus quotes fr. 112 after fr. 56. It
is uncertain what flower the Greeks meant by
* hyacinth ' ; it probably had nothing in com-
mon with our hyacinth, and it seems to have
comprised several flowers, especially the iris,
gladiolus, and larkspur.

57

' 0<p6d\Moic 6e (neAaiQ VUKTOC; acopoq.
And dark-eyed Sleep, child of Night.

From the Etymologicum Magnum, to show
that the first letter of acopog = a>po<;, ' sleep,'
was redundant.

IN CHORIAMBIC METRE lO?

57A

XpuscxpaH Gepdmnvav '
Aphrodite's handmaid bright as gold.

Philodemus, about 60 B.C., in a MS. dis-
covered at Herculaneum, says that Sappho thus
addresses'TTeiew, Persuasion. The MS. is, how-
ever, defective, and Gomperz, the editor, thinks
from the context that Hecate is here referred to.
Cf. frr. 132, 125. (Bergk formerly numbered
this fr. 141.)

58

" EXCI jiev ' Av6poueSa KaAav ajaoipav.
Andromeda has a fair requital.

Quoted by Hephaestion together with the
following, although the lines are obviously out
of different odes. Probably each fragment is
the first line of separate poems.

IO8 SAPPHO

59

¥011901, ri Tav noAuoApov ' A9pobrrav ;
Sappho ', why [celebrate] blissful Aphrodite ?

60

AeOre vuv, tippai Xdpireg, KaAAiKOMoi re Motoai.
Come now, delicate Graces and fair-haired Muses.

Come hither, fair-haired Muses, tender Graces,
Come hither to our home.

FREDERICK TENNYSON.

Quoted by Hephaestion, Attilius Fortunati-
anus (about the fifth century A.D.), and Servius,
as an example of Sappho's choriambic tetra-
meters.

61

TTapOevov abucpoovov.
A sweet-voiced maiden.
From Attilius Fortunatianus.

IN CHORIAMBIC METRE IO9

62

KcrrevaoKei, KuOepH1, afJpoc "AJxovu;, TI KC (teiyev
KarruTTTeo6e Kopai KOI KarepeiKeaQe xiravac.

Delicate Adonis is dying, Cytherea ; what
shall we do 1 Beat your breasts, maidens, and
rend your tunics.

Quoted by Hephaestion, and presumed to be
Sappho's from a passage in Pausanias, where he
says she learnt the name of the mythological
personage Oetolinus (as if otroc Aivou, ' the death
of Linus'), from the poems of Pamphos, a
mythical poet of Attica earlier than Homer, and
so to her Adonis was just like Oetolinus. The
Linus-song was a very ancient dirge or lamenta-
tion, of which a version (or rather a late render-
ing, apparently Alexandrian) has been preserved
by a Scholiast on Homer (Iliad, xviii. 569),
running thus : ' O Linus, honoured by all the
gods, for to thee first they gave to sing a song
to men in clear sweet sounds ; Phoebus in envy
slew thee, but the Muses lament thee.' A
charming example of what the Linus-song was
in the third century B.C., remains for us in
Bion's Lament for Adonis.

1 10 SAPPHO

The dirge was chiefly sung by the Greek
peasants at vintage-time, and so may have
arisen from a mythical personification of Apollo,
as the burning sun of summer suddenly slaying
the life and bloom of nature. It is said to have
been of Phoenician origin, and to have derived
its name from the words ai le nu, ' woe is us, '
which may have been the burden of the song.
The word aftivoo so frequent a refrain in the
mournful choral odes of the Greek tragic poets,
seems to indicate that the personality of Linus
was the invention of a time when the meaning
of the burden had been forgotten.

63

*Q TOV "AfctoVlV.

Ah for Adonis 1

From Marius Plotius, about 600 A.D. It seems
to be the refrain of the ode to Adonis. Cf. fr.
1 08.

Ah for Adonis ! So
The virgins cry in woe :
Ah, for the spring, the spring,
And all fleet blossoming.

MICHAEL FIELD, 1889.

IN CHORIAMBIC METRE III

' •-:. H^lSil!

'EAOovT* f£ 6p<iv(o Tiop<pupiav [exovra] nepSejucvov

Coming from heaven wearing a purple mantle.

From heaven he came,

And round him the red chlamys burned like
flame. J. A. SYMONDS.

He came from heaven in purple mantle clad.
FREDERICK TENNYSON.

Quoted by Pollux, about 180 A.D., who says
that Sappho, in her ode to Eros, out of which
this verse probably came, was the first to use the
word x^auuc, a short mantle fastened by a brooch
on the right shoulder, so as to hang in a curve
across the body.

65

Bpo6oTTc'<xe€Q aj-vai Xdpire^, SeCre Aio<; Kopai.
Come, rosy-armed pure Graces, daughters of Zeus.

Theocritus' Idyl 28, On a Distaff, according
to the argument prefixed to it, was written in the
dialect and metre of this fragment. And Philo-

112 SAPPHO

stratus, about 220 A.D., says 'Sappho loves the
rose, and always crowns it with some praise,
likening to it the beauty of her maidens ; she
likens it also to the arms of the Graces, when
she describes their elbows bare.' Cf. fr. 146.

66

— w — '0 6' "Apeuq <palai KCV "Acpaiarov aj-Hv (Jia.
But Ares says he would drag Hephaestus by force.
From Priscian, late in the fifth century A.D.

67

— v — v w ww — TToMa 6' avaDi6jua

TTOTHpia KdAaupu;.

Many thousand cups thou drainest.

Quoted by Athenaeus when descanting on
drinking-cups.

IN CHORIAMBIC METRE 113

68

KorGavoioa be Keioeai TTOTQ, KCOU juvajuooOva ae0ev
€oaeij oure TOT* OUT' u5Tepo»- ou rap nebexeig ppobcov
T(iv EK TTiepiag, aA\' a(pavH<; KHV 'Atba bojuoic
<poiTctoeic Tte6' ajuaupcov VEKUCOV eKnenoraueva.

But thou shalt ever lie dead, nor shall there be
any remembrance of thee then or thereafter, for
thou hast not of the roses of Pieria ; but thott shalt
•wander obscure even in the house of Hades, flitting
among the shadowy dead.

In the cold grave where thou shalt lie
All memory too of thee shall die,
Who in this life's auspicious hours
Disdained Pieria's genial flowers ;
And in the mansions of the dead,
With the vile crowd of ghosts, thy shade
While nobler spirits point with scorn,
Shall flit neglected and forlorn.

? FELTON. .

Unknown, unheeded, shalt thou die,
And no memorial shall proclaim

That once beneath the upper sky
Thou hadst a being and a name.

For never to the Muses' bowers

Didst thou with glowing heart repair,

Nor ever intertwine the flowers

That fancy strews unnumbered there.
H

114 SAPPHO

Doom'd o'er that dreary realm, alone,
Shunn'd by the gentler shades, to go,

Nor friend shall soothe, nor parent own
The child of sloth, the Muses' foe.

REV. R. BLAND, 1813.

Thee too the years shall cover ; thou shall be
As the rose born of one same blood with thee,
As a song sung, as a word said, and fall
Flower-wise, and be not any more at all,
Nor any memory of thee anywhere ;
For never Muse has bound above thine hair
The high Pierian flowers whose graft outgrows
All Summer kinship of the mortal rose
And colour of deciduous days, nor shed
Reflex and flush of heaven about thine head, etc.
SWINBURNE, Anactoria.

Woman dead, lie there ;
No recbrd of thee
Shall there ever be,
Since thou dost not share
Roses in Pieria grown.
In the deathful cave,
With the feeble troop
Of the folk that droop,
Lurk and flit and crave,
Woman severed and far-flown.

WILLIAM CORY, 1858.

IN CHORIAMBIC METRE 115

Thou liest dead, and there will be no memory

left behind
Of thee or thine in all the earth, for never didst

thou bind
The roses of Pierian streams upon thy brow ;

thy doom
Is writ to flit with unknown ghosts in cold and

nameless gloom.

EDWIN ARNOLD, 1869.

Yea, thou shalt die,
And lie

Dumb in the silent tomb ;
Nor of thy name
Shall there be any fame

In ages yet to be or years to come :
For of the flowering Rose,
Which on Pieria blows,

Thou hast no share :
But in sad Hades' house,
Unknown, inglorious,

'Mid the dim shades that wander there

Shalt thou flit forth and haunt the filmy air.
J. A. SYMONDS, 1883.

When thou fallest in death, dead shalt thou lie,

nor shall thy memory
Henceforth ever again be heard then or in days

to be,

Il6 SAPPHO

Since no flowers upon earth ever were thine,

plucked from Pieria's spring,
Unknown also 'mid hell's shadowy throng thou

shall go wandering.

ANON., Love in Idleness, 1883.

From Stobaeus, about 500 A.D., as addressed
to an uneducated woman. Plutarch quotes the
fragment as written to a certain rich lady ; but
in another work he says the crown of roses was
assigned to the Muses, for he remembered
Sappho's having said to some unpolished and un-
educated woman these same words. Aristldes,
about 150 A.D., speaks of Sappho's boastfully
saying to some well-to-do woman, 'that the
Muses made her blest and worthy of honour,
and that she should not die and be forgotten ' ;
though this may refer to fr. 10.

69

Ou5' Tuv boKiMoiui npooiboiociv <puog uAico

eoaesGai

TcmauTav.

Ou5' Tuv boKiMoiui npooiboiociv <puog uAico
eoaesGai acxpiav nupQevov cig ou&tva ira> xpovov

No one maiden I think shall at any time see
the sunlight that shall be as wise as thou.

IN CHORIAMBIC METRE 117

Methinks no maiden ever
Will live beneath the sun

Who is as wise as thou art, —
Not e'en till Time is done.

Quoted by Chrysippus. It is probably out
of the same ode as the preceding.

70

Tig 6' arpoiomQ TOI 6i/\fei voov,

OUK fcmarajueva ra 3p«Ke' €\KHV em TGOV acpupeov ;

What country girl bewitches thy heart, who
knows not how to draw her dress about her ankles?

What country maiden charms thee,

However fair her face,
Who knows not how to gather

Her dress with artless grace ?

Athenaeus, speaking of the care which the
ancients bestowed upon dress, says Sappho
thus jests upon Andromeda. Three other
authors quote the same lines.

Il8 SAPPHO

7i

"Hpwv €£e6i5a£' CK fudpcov rav Tavuaibpojuov.
1 taught Hero of Gyara, the swift runner.

Quoted by Choeroboscus, to show the
Aeolic accusative.

72

— w*A\Adt TU; OUK ejujui TiaXifKorcov
opfav, aAX' apaKHV rav <ppev' €j(a> w —

/ am not of a malignant nature, but have a
quiet temper.

Quoted in the Etymologicum Magnum to
show the meaning of apctKHc, 'childlike, in-
nocent.'

73

— w Aurap bpaiai
But charming [maidens] plaited garlands.

Quoted by the Scholiast on Aristophanes'
Thesmophoriazusae 401, to show that plaiting
wreaths was a sign of being in love.

IN CHORIAMBIC METRE 119

74

— w — 20 TC KOJLIOC Oepctncov "Epo^.
Thou and my servant Love.

Quoted by Maximus Tyrius to show that
Sappho agreed with Diotima when the latter
said to Socrates (Plato, Sympos., p. 328) that
Love is not the son, but the attendant and
servant, of Aphrodite. Cf. fr. 132.

75

'AAA' e<ov <piAo<; ajUMtv [aAAo]

Aeyo^ apvuao veo)T€pov
ou rap TAaooja' €700 SUVOIKHV

vtcp r' eoca fepairepa.

But if thou lovest us, choose another and a
younger bed-jellow ; for I will not brook to live
with tfiee, old woman with young man.

From Stobaeus' Anthology^ and Apostolius.

120 SAPPHO

76

Eujuop«poTepa MvaaibtKa rag airaAag

Mnasidica is more shapely than the tender
Gyrinno.

Quoted by Hephaestion as an example of
metre (cf. p. 24).

77

'Aaaporepac ou&aju' en*, w "pavva, oe6ev rii

Scornfuller than thee, Eranna> have I no-
where found.

Quoted by Hephaestion with the foregoing.
The MSS. do not agree; perhaps <S"pctwa is an
adjective, for d> eporeivH, O lovely — .

IN CHORIAMBIC METRE 121

78

Su 5'e <jre9avoic, w AIKO, nepOeGS' epdraig <pogaiaiv,
opnaKaq avHTOio auv'ppaia' anaAaioi x^poiv-
eudv6eaiv eK fap neXeTai KOI xapiTOQ MctKatpav
HaAAov TTporepHV aar€9avci)Toiai 6' anuarp^ovrai.

Do thouy Dica, set garlands round thy lovely
Siat'r, twining shoots of dill together with soft
hands : for those who have fair flowers may best
stand first, even in the favour of Goddesses ;
who turn their face away from those who lack
garlands.

Here, fairest Rhodope, recline,

And 'mid thy bright locks intertwine,

With fingers soft as softest down,

The ever verdant parsley crown.

The Gods are pleased with flowers that bloom

And leaves that shed divine perfume,

But, if ungarlanded, despise

The richest offered sacrifice.

J. H. MERIVALE.

But place those garlands on thy lovely hair,
Twining the tender sprouts of anise green
With skilful hand ; for offerings and flowers
Are pleasing to the Gods, who hate all those
Who come before them with uncrowned heads.

C. D. YONGE.

122 SAPPHO

Of foliage and flowers love-laden
Twine wreaths for thy flowing hair,

With thine own soft fingers, maiden.
Weave garlands of parsley fair ;

For flowers are sweet, and the Graces
On suppliants wreathed with may

Look down from their heavenly places,
But turn from the crownless away.

J. A. SYMONDS, 1883.,,

Mr. J. A. Symonds has also thus expanded
the lines into a sonnet (1883) : —

Bring summer flowers, bring pansy, violet,
Moss-rose and sweet-briar and blue colum-
bine;

Bring loveliest leaves, rathe privet,*eglantine,
Brown myrtles with the dews of morning wet :
Twine thou a wreath upon thy brows to set ;
With thy soft hands the wayward tendrils

twine ;
Then place them, maiden, on those curls of

thine,
Those curls too fair for gems or coronet.

Sweet is the breath of blossoms, and the Graces,
When suppliants through Love's temple wend
their way,

MI CHORIAMBIC METRE 123

Look down with smiles from their celestial places
On maidens wreathed with chaplets of the

may;
But from the crownless choir they hide their

faces,

Nor heed them when they sing nor when
they pray.

Athenaeus, quoting this fragment, says : —
'Sappho gives a more simple reason for our
wearing garlands, speaking as follows ... in
which lines she enjoins all who offer sacrifice
to wear garlands on their headss as they are
beautiful things and acceptable to the Gods.'

79

'Er<*> oe <piAHju' appoouvav, KOI juoi TO Aajmpov
cpoq w c(?\ia) KCU TO KciAov

I love delicacy, and for me Love has the sun's
splendour and beauty.

In speaking of perfumes, Athenaeus, quoting
Clearchus, says : — ' Sappho, being a thorough
woman and a poetess besides, was ashamed to
separate honour from elegance, and speaks
thus . . . making it evident to everybody
that the desire of life that she confessed had
brilliancy and honour in it; and these things
especially belong to virtue.'

124 SAPPHO

80

Kau |uev re ruAav KaanoXecc.
And down I set the cushion.
Quoted by Herodian, along with fr. 50.

81

'0 nAoCTOC aveu oeu r* opera 'or* OUK aoivHC napotKO$
[H 6' e£ aju90Tepcov Kpaon; eubai/noviaq exa.rb aKpov].

Wealth without thee, Worth, is no safe neigh-
bour [but the mixture of both is the height of
happiness},

Wealth without virtue is a dangerous guest ,
Who holds them mingled is supremely blest.
J. H. MERIVALE.

From the Scholiast on Pindar. The second
line appears to be the gloss of the commentator,
though Blass believes it is Sappho's.

IN VARIOUS METRES 12$

VI
IN VARIOUS METRES

82

Aura 6e <ju KaAAionou
And thou thyself, Calliope.

Quoted by Hephaestion when he is analysing
a metre invented by Archilochus.

83

Aauoiq ana\aq era

ev

Sleep thou in the bosom of thy tender girl-
friend.

From the Etymologicum Magnum. Blass
thinks that the proper place for this fragment
is among the Epithalamia.

126 SAPPHO

84

AeCpo &Hure Molaui, xpuoiov \inoioau
Hither now, Muses, leaving golden . . .

Quoted by Hephaestion as an example of a
verse made of two Ithyphallics.

85

"E<m jmoi KaAa naiQ, xpusioiciv avSejuoiaiv
ejuupepHV exoioa ju6p9av, KAfiig' afandra,
am ra<; ef01 °^£ Aubiav naiaav oub' eptwvav.

/ have a fair daughter with a form like a
golden flower, Cleis the beloved, above whom 1
[prize] nor all Lydia nor lovely [Lesbos] . . .

I have a child, a lovely one,

In beauty like the golden sun,

Or like sweet flowers of earliest bloom ;

And Clai's is her name, for whom

I Lydia's treasures, were they mine,

Would glad resign. J. H. MERIVALE.

A lovely little girl is ours,

Kle'is the beloved,

Kle'is is her name,

Whose beauty is as the golden flowers.
FREDERICK TENNYSON.

IN THE IONIC A MINORS METRE I2/

Quoted and elaborately scanned by Hephae-
stion, although Bergk regards the lines as
merely trochaic.

86

TToXAa
TTa>\uavaicn6a nai6a

All joy to thee, daughter of Polyanax.

From Maximus Tyrius. It seems to be
addressed to either Gorgo or Andromeda.

VII
IN THE IONIC A MINORE METRE

8?

Za 6* eAetaMuv ovap KunpOfevH9.

In a dream I spake with the daughter of
Cyprus.

I.e. Aphrodite. From Hephaestion.

128 SAPPHO

88

Ti Me TTav6ioviq a> " pavva

Why, lovely swallow, daughter of Pandwn,
[weary] me ?

From Hephaestion, who says Sappho wrote
whole songs in this metre. 'Q "pawa is Is.
Vossius' emendation; <bptiva is the ordinary
reading, which Hesychius explains as perhaps
an epithet of the swallow 'dwelling under the
roof.'

Ah, Procne, wherefore dost thou weary me ?
Thus flitting out and flitting in ...
Tease not the air with this tumultuous wing.
MICHAEL FIELD, 1889.

89

. . . 'Auq>i 6' ufJpciq AocioiQ eu Fe miKaooev.
She wrapped herself well in delicate hairy . . .

From Pollux, who says the line refers to fine
closely-woven linen.

IN THE IONIC A MINORE METRE 129

90

narep, ourot buvajuai KpeKHv TOV i<rrov,
Ti66cp bdjueica naiboc Ppa6ivav 61' 'Acppobrrav.

Sweet Mother, I cannot weave my web, broken
as I am by longing for a boy, at soft Aphrodite's
will.

[As o'er her loom the Lesbian maid
In love-sick languor hung her head,

Unknowing where her fingers strayed
She weeping turned away and said — ]

'Oh, my sweet mother, 'tis in vain,
I cannot weave as once I wove,
So wildered is my heart and brain
With thinking of that youth I love. '
T. MOORE, Evenings in
Greece, p. 18.

Mother, I cannot mind my wheel;

My fingers ache, my lips are dry :
Oh, if you felt the pain I feel !

But oh, who ever felt as I ?

W. S. LANDOR, Simonidea, 1807.

Sweet mother, I can spin no more,
Nor ply the loom as heretofore,
For love of him.

FREDERICK TENNYSON.
I

I3O SAPPHO

Sweet mother, I the web

Can weave no more ;
Keen yearning for my love

Subdues me sore,
And tender Aphrodite

Thrills my heart's core.

M. J. WALHOUSE.

Cf. Mrs. John Hunter's ' My mother bids
me bind my hair,' etc.

From Hephaestion, as an example of metre.

VIII
EPITHALAMIA, BRIDAL SONGS

91

hyoi ?>H TO ueAa8pov

' YUHVOOV
aeppere TtKTovrec avbpeq'

' YjuHvaov.
rdjuPpoc; epxcroi isoq "Apcu'i,

[' YjuHvaov]
avbpog MefdAco noXu (ueUwv

[* Y.uHvaov].

Raise high the roof-beam, carpenters. (Hy-
tnenaeusJ) Like Ares comes the bridegroom,
(ffymenaeus /) taller far than a tall man.
( ffymenaeus /)

EPITHALAMIA, BRIDAL SONGS 1$!

Artists, raise the rafters high !

Ample scope and stately plan —
Mars-like comes the bridegroom nigh,

Loftier than a lofty man.
ANON., Edinb, Rev.^ 1832, p. 109.

High lift the beams of the chamber,

Workmen, on high;

Like Are's in step comes the Bridegroom ,
Like him of the song of Terpander,

Like him in majesty,

F. T. PALGRAVE, 1854.

Quoted by Hephaestion as an example of a
mes-hymnic poem, where the refrain follows
each line. The hymenaeus or wedding-song
was sung by the bride's attendants as they led
her to the bridegroom's house, addressing
Hymen the god of marriage. The metre
seems, says Professor Mahaffy (Hist, of Class.
Greek Z*Y., i., p. 20, 1880), to be the same as
that of the Linus song; cf. fr. 62.

92

, ox; or' aoiooq 6 AesBioq aAAo&cmoiaiv.

Tmvering, as the Lesbian singer towers among
men of other lands.

132 SAPPHO

Quoted by Demetrius, about 150 A.D. It is
uncertain what 'Lesbian singer' is here re-
ferred to; probably Terpander, but Neue
thinks it may mean the whole Lesbian race,
from their pre-eminence in poetry.

93

Oiov TO rAuKUMaAov €peii6€Tcu otKpw eir* u
QKpov en* aKporoiTtp- AeAdeovro be.
ou MOV tKAeAdeovr', aAA' OUK ebuvavr'

As the sweet-apple blushes on the end of the
bough, the very end of the bough, which the
gatherers overlooked, nay overlooked not but
could not reach.

— O fair — O sweet !

As the sweet apple blooms high on the bough,
High as the highest, forgot of the gatherers :

So thou : —

Yet not so : nor forgot of the gatherers ;
High o'er their reach in the golden air,

— O sweet — O fair !

F. T. PALGRAVE, 1854.

Quoted by the Scholiast on Hermogenes,
and by others, to explain the word fAuKUMaAov,
'sweet-apple,' an apple grafted on a quince;

EPITHALAMIA, BRIDAL SONGS 133

it is used as a term of endearment by Theo-
critus (Idyl xi. 39), 'Of thee, my love, my
sweet-apple, I sing.' Himerius, writing about
360 A.D., says : ' Aphrodite's orgies we leave to
Sappho of Lesbos, to sing to the lyre and make
the bride-chamber her theme. She enters the
chamber after the games, makes the room,
spreads Homer's bed, assembles the maidens,
leads them into the apartment with Aphrodite
in the Graces' car and a band of Loves for
playmates. Binding her tresses with hyacinth,
except what is parted to fringe her forehead,
she lets the rest wave to the wind if it chance
to strike them. Their wings and curls she
decks with gold, and drives them in procession
before the car as they shake the torch on high.'
And particularly this : ' It was for Sappho to
liken the maiden to an apple, allowing to those
who would pluck before the time to touch not
even with the finger-tip, but to him who was to
gather the apple in season to watch its ripe
beauty; to compare the bridegroom with
Achilles, to match the youth's deeds with the
hero's.' Further on he says: 'Come then, we
will lead him into the bride-chamber and
persuade him to meet the beauty of the bride.
O fair and lovely, the Lesbian's praises appertain
to thee : thy play-mates are rosy-ankled Graces
and golden Aphrodite, and the Seasons make

134 SAPPHO

the meadows bloom.' These last words
especially —

O fair, O lovely . . .

seem taken out of one of Sappho's hymeneal
odes, although they also occur in Theocritus,
Idyl xviii. 38.

94

Oiav rav uaKiv0ov ev oupeoi noijuevec
noaai KaTacrrei3oioi,

As on the hills the shepherds trample the
hyacinth under foot, and the flower darkens on
the ground.

Compare Catullus, xi. 21-24: —

Think not henceforth, thou, to recall Catullus'
Love ; thy own sin slew it, as on the meadow's
Verge declines, un-gently beneath the plough-

share
Stricken, a flower. (ROBINSON ELLIS.)

EPITHALAMIA, BRIDAL SONGS I$5
And Vergil, Aeneid, ix. 43 5, of Euryalus dying: —

And like the purple flower the plough cuts down
He droops and dies.

Pines she like to the hyacinth out on the path

by the hill top ;
Shepherds tread it aside, and its purples lie

lost on the herbage.

EDWIN ARNOLD, 1869.

ONE GIRL.
(A combination from Sappho.)

i.
Like the sweet apple which reddens upon the

topmost bough,
A-top on the topmost twig, — which the pluckers

forgot, somehow, —

Forgot it not, nay, but got it not, for none
could get it till now.

n.

Like the wild hyacinth flower which on the

hills is found,
Which the passing feet of the shepherds for

ever tear and wound,
Until the purple blossom is trodden into the

ground.

D. G. ROSSETTI, 1870 :

1 36 SAPPHO

in 1881 he altered the title to Beauty. (A
combination from Sappho.)

Quoted by Demetrius, as an example of the
ornament and beauty proper to a concluding
sentence. Bergk first attributed the lines to
Sappho.

95

ftorrepe, ndvra 9epa>v, oca 9aivoAig eaKe&aa' auwq,
olv, <pepec aifa, 9epeiq ami Marepi naifca.

Evening, thou that bringest all that bright
morning scattered; thou bringest the sheep, the
goat, the child back to her mother.

Thus imitated by Byron : —

O Hesperus, thou bringest all good things —
Home to the weary, to the hungry cheer,

To the young bird the parent's brooding wings,
The welcome stall to the o'erlaboured steer ;

Whate'er of peace about our hearthstone clings,
Whate'er our household gods protect of dear,

Are gathered round us by thy look of rest ;

Thou bring'st the child too to its mother's breast.
Don Juan, iii. 107.

EPITHALAMIA, BRIDAL SONGS 137
And by Tennyson : —

The ancient poetess singeth, that Hesperus all

things bringeth,
Smoothing the wearied mind : bring me my

love, Rosalind.
Thou comest morning or even; she cometh

not morning or evening.
False-eyed Hesper, unkind, where is my sweet

Rosalind ?

Leonine Elegiacs, 1830-1884.

Hesperus brings all things back
Which the daylight made us lack,
Brings the sheep and goats to rest,
Brings the baby to the breast.

EDWIN ARNOLD, 1869.

Hesper, thou bringest back again
All that the gaudy daybeams part,

The sheep, the goat, back to their pen,
The child home to his mother's heart.
FREDERICK TENNYSON, 1890.

Evening, all things thou bringest

Which dawn spread apart from each other ;
The lamb and the kid thou bringest,

Thou bringest the boy to his mother.

J. A. SYMONDS, 1883.

138 SAPPHO

Hesper, whom the poet call'd the Bringer

home of all good things. — TENNYSON,
Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, 1886.

From the Etymologicum Magnum, where it
is adduced to show the meaning of aucoq, ' dawn.'
The fragment occurs also in Demetrius, as an
example of Sappho's grace. One cannot but
believe that Catullus had in his mind some
such hymeneal ode of Sappho's as that in
which this fragment must have occurred when
he wrote his Vesper adest, juvenes, consurgite :
Vesper Ofympo, etc. (Ixii.), part of which was
imitated in the colloquy between Opinion and
Truth in Ben Jonson's The Barriers.

96

'AindpSevoc eoaojuai.
/ shall be ever maiden.

From a Parisian MS. edited by Cramer,
adduced to show the Aeolic form of 6ei, ; ever.'

EPITHALAMIA, BRIDAL SONGS 139

97

HOI narnp.
We will give, says the father . , .
From a Parisian MS. edited by Cramer.

98

0upd)pcp nobei; eirroporu 101,
ra 5e octupaAct rreune36Ha,
* e£enovaaav.

To the doorkeeper feet seven fathoms long, and
sandals of five bulls' hides, the work of ten
cobblers.

From Hephaestion, as an example of metre.
Demetrius says : ' And elsewhere Sappho girds
at the rustic bridegroom and the doorkeeper
ready for the wedding, in prosaic rather than
poetic phrase, as if she were reasoning rather
than singing, using words out of harmony with
dance and song.'

140 SAPPHO

99

"OAf5i€ raja3p€,ooi /nev b» raMoq, cbg apao,
eKTcreAeor', CXHQ oe ndp0evov, av apao.

Happy bridegroom, now is thy wedding come
to thy desire, and thou hast the maiden of thy
desire,

Happy bridegroom, thou art blest
With blisses far beyond the rest,

For thou hast won

The chosen one,
The girl thou lovest best.

FREDERICK TENNYSON.

Quoted by Hephaestion, along with the
following, to exemplify metres ; both fragments
seem to belong to the same ode.

IOO

6' CTT' ijuipTcp KJXUTCU npooonrcp.

And a soft [paleness] is spread over the
lovely face.

In the National Library of Madrid there
is a MS. of an epithalamium by Choricius, a

EPITHALAMIA, BRIDAL SONGS 141

rhetorician of Gaza, who flourished about 520
A.D., in which the lamented Ch. Graux (Revue
de Philologie, 1880, p. 81) found a quotation
from Sappho which is partly identical with this
fragment preserved by Hephaestion. H. Weil
thus attempts ro restore the passage : —

Sol x°piev MCV et5o<;, onncrra 6' — w — 3
', epoc 6' en' ij

TTpOatOTTCp'

a' '

Well favoured is thy form, and thine eyes . . .
honeyed, and love is spread over thy fair face . . .
Aphrodite has honoured thee above all.

Two apparent imitations by Catullus are
quoted by Weil to confirm his restoration of
Sappho's verses; viz., mellitos oculos, honeyed
eyes (48, i), and pulcher es, neque te Venus
negligit, fair thou art, nor does Venus neglect
thee (61, 194).

101

*0 Mtv rap KaAoc, oooov I&HV, neAerai
6 be Kara9oQ OUTIKQ Kal Ka\oq ieaoerai.

He who is fair to look upon is [good], and he
who is good will soon be fair also.

142 SAPPHO

Beauty, fair flower, upon the surface lies ;
But worth with beauty e'en in aspect vies.

? FELTON.

Galen, the physician, writing about 160 A.D.,
says : ' It is better therefore, knowing that the
beauty of youth is like Spring flowers, its
pleasure lasting but a little while, to approve of
what the Lesbian [here] says, and to believe
Solon when he points out the same.'

I O2

*Hp' en napeeviag eTTi3aAAojuai ;
Do I still long for maidenhood?

Quoted by Apollonius, and by the Scholiast
on Dionysius of Thrace, to illustrate the inter-
rogative particle Spa, Aeolic fipa, and as an
example of the catalectic iambic.

103

Xoipoioo vuiu<pa, xaiprro) 6> 6 fduPpoq.

The bride [comes] rejoicing; let the bride-
groom rejoice.

From Hephaestion. as a catalectic iambic.

EPITHALAMIA, BRIDAL SONGS 143

104

Tup o', <o <piAe ra

ppa&ivcp ce KoAiar* ei'K«a6a>.

Whereimto may I well liken thee, dear bride-
groom ? To a soft shoot may I best liken thee.

From Hephaestion, as an example of metre.

105

. . . Xaipe, vuj

, rime fduppe, no\Aa.

Hail, bnde J noble bridegroom, all hail!

Quoted by Servius, about 390 A.D., on
Vergil, Georg. i. 31 ; also referred to by Pollux
and Julian.

144 SAPPHO

1 06

Ou rap HV arepa naiQ, a> raMPpe, TOiaura.

For there was no other girl, O bridegroom,
like her.

From Dionysius of Halicarnassus.

107, 1 08

' Eoner' * YJUHVQOV.
*Q TOV ' Abcoviov.

Sing Hymenaeus!
Ah for Adonis!

From Plotius, about the fifth or sixth century
A.D., to show the metre of Sappho's hymeneal
odes. The text is corrupt; the first verse is
thus emended by Bergk, the second by Scaliger.
Cf. fr. 63.

EPITHALAMIA, BRIDAL SONGS 145

109

A. TTapGevia, nap8evia, noi Me Ainoia'

B. OUK€TI H£O> TTpb<; 0€, OUKtTl H£O).

A. Maidenhood, maidenJwod, -whither art thou

gone away from me ?

B. Never again will I come to thee, never again.

' Sweet Rose of May, sweet Rose of May,
Whither, ah whither fled away ? '
' What 's gone no time can e'er restore —
I come no more, I come no more.'

J. H. MERIVALE.

From Demetrius, who quoted the fragment
to show the grace of Sappho's style and the
beauty of repetition. f

no

"AAAav MH KCiMEOTepav <ppeva.
Fool, faint not thou in thy strong heart.

From a very corrupt passage in Herodian.
The translation is from Bergk's former emenda-
tion—

"AAAa MH KOM€ TU areptav ^peva.
K

146 SAPPHO

III

4>aiverai Foi
To himself he seems . . .

From Apollonius, to show that the Aeolians
used the digamma, f. Bergk says this frag-
ment does not belong to fr. 2.

112

*Qto> noAu AeuKorepov.
Much whiter than an egg.
'•' From Athenaeus; cf. frs. 56 and 122.

MKT* euoi MeAi MHTC (ue
Neither honey nor bee for me.

A proverb quoted by many late authors,
referring to those who wish for good unmixed
with evil. They seem to be the words of the
bride. This, and the second line of fr. 62, and

EPITHALAMIA, BRIDAL SONGS 147

many other verses, show Sappho's fondness for
alliteration ; frs. 4 and 5, among several others,
show that she did not ignore the charm of
assonance.

114

MH KIVH xtpa5ot<;.
Stir not the shingle.

Quoted by the Scholiast on Apollonius
Rhodius to show that xepa&eq were 'little heaps
of stones.'

Thou burnest us.

Compare Swinburne's —
My life is bitter with thy love ; thine eyes
Blind me, thy tresses burn me, thy sharp sighs
Divide my flesh and spirit with soft sound, etc.

Anactoria.

Quoted by Apollonius to show the Aeolic
form of Hjiac, 'us.'

148 SAPPHO

116

*Hjjirru3iov oroXaooov.
A napkin dripping,

From the Scholiast on Aristophanes' P/utus,
quoted to show the meaning of HMirCptov, 'a
half worn out shred of linen with which to wipe
the hands.'

117 *

Tbv Fov TTuiba KaXet.

She called him her son.

Quoted by Apollonius to show the Aeolic
use of the digamma.

EPIGRAMS 149

IX

EPIGRAMS

All three are preserved only in the Greek
Anthology. The authenticity of the last, fr.
120, is doubtful. To none of them does Bergk
restore the form of the Aeolic dialect.

118

TTai&eq, 5<pa)voq <oioa rob' evvtmo, at TIC
<pcovav aKajuaTOv KctT6ew4va irpb nobaiv

Aieonia ue Kopa AcrroCc aveSHKev ' Apiara
' EpuOKAeibaia TO> Saova'ia&a, .

oa nponoAoq, 6eanoiva fuvaiKaiv a ou
€UK/\eioov

Maidens, dumb as 1 am, I speak thus, if any
ask, and set before your feet a tireless voice: To
Letds daughter Aethopia was I dedicated by
Arista daughter of Hermodeides son of Saon-
diades, thy servant, O queen of women; whom
bkss thou, and deign to glorify our house.

I5O SAPPHO

ON A PRIESTESS OF DIANA.

Does any ask ? I answer from the dead ;
A voice that lives is graven o'er my head :
To dark-eyed Dian, ere my days begun,
Aristo vowed me, wife of Saon's son :
Then hear thy priestess, hear, O virgin Power,
And thy best gifts on Saon's lineage shower.

R.

The goddess here invoked as the ' queen of
women' appears to have been ArtSmis, the
Diana of the Romans.

119

Tijua&oq 66e KOVIC, TOV &H npb roMoio eavouaav

6t£ctTO ^epaecpovac Kudveog BaAajuux;,
Sg KOI &TT099i]utvac naaai veo0ari

IjLiepTav Kparbc eSevro KOMOV.

This is the dust of Timas, whom Persephone s
dark chamber received > dead before her wedding;
when she perished, all her fellows dressed with
sharpened steel the lovely tresses of their heads.

EPIGRAMS 151

This dust was Timas' ; ere her bridal hour
She lies in Proserpina's gloomy bower;
Her virgin playmates from each lovely head
Cut with sharp steel their locks, their strewments
for the dead.

SIR CHARLES A. ELTON.

This is the dust of Timas, whom unwed
Persephone locked in her darksome bed :
For her the maids who were her fellows shore
Their curls, and to her tomb this tribute bore.

J. A. SYMONDS.

I2O

TcJ> rpinet TTeAcirwvi natHp eneQHKe
Kupiov Kal Kcunav

Over the fisherman Pelagon his father Meniscus
set weel and oar, memorial of a luckless life.

ON A FISHERMAN.

This oar and net and fisher's wickered snare
Meniscus placed above his buried son —

Memorials of the lot in life he bare,
The hard and needy life of Pelagon.

SIR CHARLES A. ELTON.

152 SAPPHO

Here, to the fisher Pelagon, his sire Meniscus

laid
A wicker-net and oar, to show his weary life and

trade. LORD NEAVES.

Above a fisher's tomb
Were set his withy-basket and his oar,

The tokens of his doom,
Of how in life his labour had been sore :
A father put them up above his son,
Meniscus over luckless Pelagon.

MICHAEL FIELD, 1889.

Bergk sees no reason to accept the voice of
tradition in attributing this epigram to Sappho.

X

MISCELLANEOUS

121

Athenaeus says : —

'It is something natural that people who
fancy themselves beautiful and elegant should
be fond of flowers ; on which account the
companions of Persephone are represented as
gathering flowers. And Sappho says she saw —

av9e' aneprouaav naib' afav diroAav,
' A maiden full tender plucking flowers. '

MISCELLANEOUS 153

122, 123

TToAu noKTiboc abu/neAecrrepa, xpuaa> ypvaorkpa.

Far sweeter of tone than harp, more golden than
gold.

Quoted by Demetrius as an example of hyper-
bolic phrase. A commentator on Hermogenes
the rhetorician says: 'These things basely
flatter the ear, like the erotic phrases which
Anacreon and Sappho use, rdAaicroc AeuKortpa
whiter than milk, u&aroc anaAampa fresher than
water, TTHKTI&OOV cuMeAearipa more musical than
the harp, timou rauporepa more skittish than a
horse, pobcov agporepa more delicate than the rose,
iucrriou eavou MaActKcorepa softer than a fine robe,
XpuooC Tiuuampa more precious than gold'

124

Demetrius says : —

' Wherefore also Sappho is eloquent and sweet
when she sings of Beauty, and of Love and Spring
and the Kingfisher ; and every beautiful expres-
sion is woven into her poetry, besides what she
herself invented.'

154 SAPPHO

125

Maximus Tyrius says : —

'Diotima says that Love flourishes in pro-
sperity, but dies in adversity ; a sentiment which
Sappho comprehends when she calls Love rAuia-
niKpog bitter-sweet [cf. fr. 40] and oAreoi6a>po<;
giver of pain. Socrates calls Love the wizard,
Sappho juueonAoKoc thejveaver of fictions?

126

To yt\Hjun TOUJUOV.

My darling.

Quoted by Julian, and by Theodorus Hyrta-
cenus in the twelfth century A.D., as of 'the
wise Sappho.' Bergk says Sappho would have
written TO jueAHna a>juov in her own dialect.

MISCELLANEOUS 155

127

Aristides says : —

'Tc ravog the brightness standing over the
whole city, ou &iaq>6eipov TCH; ov|/ei<; not destroying
the sight, as Sappho says, but developing at once
and crowning and watering with cheerfulness ;
in no way uaKiveivco av6ei onoiov like a hyacinth-
flower, but such as earth and sun never yet
showed to men.'

128

Pollux writes : —

'Anacreon . . . says they are crowned
also with dill, as both Sappho [cf. fr. 78] and
Alcaeus say ; though these also say acAivou; with
parsley.'

I$6 SAPPHO

129

Philostratus says : —

'Thus contend [the maidens] po&onHxeu: K<M
'AiKd>m&ec Koi Ka/vAmapHOi Kai u^upwvoi with rosy
arms and glancing eyes and fair cheeks and
honeyed voices — this indeed is Sappho's sweet
salutation.'

And Aristaenetus : —

'Before the porch the most musical and
M€iAixo9(ovoi soft-voiced of the maidens sang the
hymeneal song ; this indeed is Sappho's sweet-
est utterance.'

Antipater of Sidon, Anthol. Pal. ix. 66, and
others, call Sappho sweet-voiced.

130

Libanius the rhetorician, about the fourth
century A.D., says : —

'If therefore nought prevented Sappho the
Lesbian from praying VUKTO QUTH reveoeai birrAaaiav
that the night might be doubled for her, let me
also ask for something similar. Time, father of

MISCELLANEOUS 157

year and months, stretch out this very year for
us as far as may be, as, when Herakles was born,
thou didst prolong the night.'

Bergk thinks that Sappho probably prayed for
VUKTCJ rpiTiAaoiav a night thrice as long as an ordi-
nary night, in reference to the myth of Jupiter
and Alcmene, the mother of Hercules.

Strabo says : —

' A hundred furlongs further (from Elaea, a
city in Aeolis) is Cane", the promontory opposite
to Lectum, and forming the Gulf of Adramyttium,
of which the Elaitic Gulf is a part. Canae is a
small city of the Locrians of Cynus, over against
the most southerly extremity of Lesbos, situated
in the Canaean territory, which extends to Argi-
nusae and the overhanging cliff which some call
Aega, as if "a goat," but the second syllable
should be pronounced long, Aega, like OKTO and
apxa, for this was the name of the whole moun-
tain which at present is called Cand or Canae
. . . and the promontory itself seems after-
wards to have been called Aega, as Sappho says,
the rest Cane or Canae.'

158 SAPPHO

132

The Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius says : —

' Apollonius calls Love the son of Aphrodite,
Sappho of Earth and Heaven?

But the Argument prefixed to Theocritus, Idyl
xiii., says : —

* Sappho called Love the child of Aphrodite
and Heaven?

And Pausanias, about 180 A.D., says : —

'On Love Sappho the Lesbian sang many
things which do not agree with one another.'
Cf. fr. 74.

133

Himerius says : —

'Thou art, I think, an evening-star, of all
stars the fairest : this is Sappho's song to
Hesperus.' And again : c Now thou didst ap-
pear like that fairest of all stars ; for the
Athenians call thee Hesperus.'

Bergk thinks Sappho's line ran thus : —
Aarepcov ndvrcov 6 KaAicrroc . . •
Of all stars the fairest.

MISCELLANEOUS 159

Elsewhere Himerius refers to what seems an
imitation of Sappho, and says : ' If an ode had
been wanted, I should have given him such an
ode as this —

o&€tov epa>T(ov ppuouoa, Nuu<pa
afoAua KctAMarov, i9i npbc euvAv, t9i npbq
AiXa nai^ouaa, rAuKeia vuucpicp- "Ecmepoq a* eKoOoav
Cj-ot, aprupoepovov ?uriav " Hpav 6aujLto{ouaav.'

Bride teeming with rosy loves, bride, fairest
image of the goddess of Paphos, go to the couch, go
to the bed, softly sporting, sweet to the bridegroom.
May Hesperus lead thee rejoicing, honouring Hera
of the silver throne, goddess of marriage.

Bride, in whose breast haunt rosy loves !
Bride, fairest of the Paphian groves !
Hence, to thy marriage rise, and go !
Hence, to thy bed, where thou shall show
With honeyed play thy wedded charms,
Thy sweetness in the bridegroom's arms !
Let Hesper lead thee forth, a wife,
Willing and worshipping for life,
The silver-throned, the wedlock dame,
Queen Hera, wanton without shame !

J. A. SYMONDS, 1883,

160 SAPPHO

134

The Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius says : —

'The story of the love of Selene is told by
Sappho, and by Nicander in the second book of
his Europa ; and it is said that Selene came to
Endymion in the same cave ' (on Mount Latmus
in Caria).

135

The Scholiast on Hesiod, Op. et D., 74,
says : —

'Sappho calls Persuasion 'A9pobiTHc euj-orepa
Daughter of Aphrodite.' Cf. fr. 141.

136

Maximus Tyrius says : —

' Socrates blames Xanthippe for lamenting his
death, as Sappho blames her daughter —

Oi) fop 6ejuu; ev juouaonoAcov oiiua Bpnvuv etvar
OUK ajujui npenei rate.

For lamentation may not be in a poet's house :
such things befit not us.'

In the home of the Muses 'tis bootless to mourn.
FREDERICK TENNYSON.

MISCELLANEOUS l6l

137

Aristotle, in his Rhetoric, ii. 23, writes : —

H oocnrep Sampoo, on TO anoQvHSKeiv KQKOV oi 6eot
fop ouTai KeKpiKaaiv aTTe6vHOKOv fap av.

Gregory, commenting on Hermogenes, also
quotes the same saying : —

otov <pn<3iv H Zan9<b, on TO airoOvnoKeiv KOKOV oi
6eoi fap OUTCO KeKpiKaaiv aneSvHGKOv fap av, eirrep HV
KO\OV TO

Several attempts have been made to restore
these words to a metrical form, and this of
Hartung's appears to be the simplest : —

To GvuoKetv KOKOV OUTCO KGKpiKaai 6eor
e0vacsKOv fop av einep KaAov HV robe.

Death is evil ; the Gods have so judged : had
it been good, they would die.

The preceding fragment (136) seems to have
formed part of the same ode as the present.
Perhaps it was this ode, which Sappho sent to
her daughter forbidding her to lament her
mother's death, that Solon is said to have so
highly praised. The story is quoted from Aelian
L

162 SAPPHO

by Stobaeus thus: 'Solon the Athenian [who
died about 558 B.C.], son of Execestides, on his
nephew's singing an ode of Sappho's over their
wine, was pleased with it, and bade the boy teach
it him ; and when some one asked why he
took the trouble, he said, Tva juaecbv aurb awoeavcj,
' That I may not die before I have learned it'

138

Athenaeus says : —

'Naucratis has produced some celebrated
courtesans of exceeding beauty ; as Doricha,
who was beloved by Charaxus, brother of the
beautiful Sappho, when he went to Naucratis on
business, and whom she accuses in her poetry of
having robbed him of much. Herodotus calls
her Rhodopis, not knowing that Rhodopis was
different from the Doricha who dedicated the
famous spits at Delphi.'

Herodotus, about 440 B.C., said : —

' Rhodopis came to Egypt with Xanthes of
Samos ; and having come to make money, she
was ransomed for a large sum by Charaxus of
Mitylene, son of Scamandronymus and brother

MISCELLANEOUS 163

of Sappho the poetess. Thus Rhodopis was
made free, and continued in Egypt, and being
very lovely acquired great riches for a Rhodopis,
though no way sufficient to erect such a pyramid
[as Mycerlnus'] with. For as any one who wishes
may to this day see the tenth of her wealth, there
is no need to attribute any great wealth to her.
For Rhodopis was desirous of leaving a monu-
ment to herself in Greece, and having had such
a work made as no one ever yet devised and
dedicated in a temple, to offer it at Delphi as a
memorial of herself : having therefore made from
the tenth of her wealth a great number of iron
spits for roasting oxen, as far as the tenth allowed,
she sent them to Delphi ; and they are still piled
up behind the altar which the Chians dedicated,
and opposite the temple itself. The courtesans
of Naucratis are generally very lovely : for in the
first place this one, of whom this account is given,
became so famous that all the Greeks became
familiar with the name Rhodopis ; and in the
next place, after her another whose name was
Archidice became celebrated throughout Greece,
though less talked about than the former. As
for Charaxus, after ransoming Rhodopis he
returned to Mitylene, where Sappho ridiculed
him bitterly in an ode.'

1 64 SAPPHO

And Strabo : —

' It is said that the tomb of the courtesan was
erected by her lovers : Sappho the lyric poet calls
her Doricha. She was beloved by Sappho's
brother Charaxus, who traded to the port of
Naucratis with Lesbian wine. Others call her
Rhodopis.'

And another writer (Appendix Prov.t iv. 51)

says : —

' The beautiful courtesan Rhodopis, whom
Sappho and Herodotus commemorate, was of
Naucratis in Egypt.'

139

Athenaeus says : —

' The beautiful Sappho in several places cele-
brates her brother, Larichus, as cup-bearer to
the Mitylenaeans in the town-hall.'

The Scholiast on the Iliad, xx. 234, says : —
' It was the custom, as Sappho also says, for
well-born and beautiful youths to pour out wine.

Cf. fr. 5.

MISCELLANEOUS 165

I4O

Palaephatus, probably an Alexandrian Greek,
says :•—

' Phaon gained his livelihood by a boat and
the sea ; the sea was crossed by a ferry ; and no
complaint was made by any one, since he was
just, and only took from those who had means.
He was a wonder among the Lesbians for his
character. The goddess — they call Aphrodite
"the goddess" — commends the man, and having
put on the appearance of a woman now grown
old, asks Phaon about sailing ; he was swift to
wait on her and carry her across and demand
nothing. What thereupon does the goddess do ?
They say she transformed the man and restored
him to youth and beauty. This is that Phaon,
her love for whom Sappho several tknes made
into a song.'

The story is repeated by many writers. Cf.
fr. 29.

HI

[Fr. 141 now appears as fr. 57 A,

166 SAPPHO

142

Pausanias says : —

'Yet that gold does not contract rust the
Lesbian poetess is a witness, and gold itself
shows it.'

And the Scholiast on Pindar, Pyth.^ iv. 407 : —

' But gold is indestructible ; and so says
Sappho,

AIOQ note b xpuooc, Keivov ol OHQ ou&? KIQ bdnrei,
Gold is son ot Zeus, no moth nor worm devours it?
Sappho's own phrase is lost.

Aulus Gellius, about 160 A.D., writes: —

'Homer says Niobe had six sons and six
daughters, Euripides seven of each, Sappho nine,
Bacchylides and Pindar ten.'

Cf. fr. 31, the only line extant from the ode
here referred to.

MISCELLANEOUS l6/

144

Servius, commenting on Vergil, Aeneid, vi. 21,
says : —

' Some would have it believed that Theseus
rescued along with himself seven boys and seven
maidens, as Plato says in his Phaedo, and Sappho
in her lyrics, and Bacchylides in his dithyrambics,
and Euripides in his Hercules?

No such passage from Sappho has been pre-
served.

145

Servius, commenting on Vergil, Eclog., vi. 42,
says : —

'Prometheus, son of lapetus and Clymene,
after he had created man, is said to have
ascended to heaven by help of Minerva, and
having applied a small torch [or perhaps ' wand ']
to the sun's wheel, he stole fire and showed it to
men. The Gods being angered hereby sent two
evils upon the earth, fevers and disease [the text
is here obviously corrupt ; it ought to be ' women
and disease ' or ' fevers and women '], as Sappho
and Hesiod tell.'

168 SAPPHO

146

Philostratus says : —

' Sappho loves the Rose, and always crowns
it with some praise, likening beautiful maidens
to it.'

This remark seems to have led some of the
earlier collectors of Sappho's fragments to
include the ' pleasing song in commendation of
the Rose ' quoted by Achilles Tatius in his love-
story Clitophon and Leurippe, but there is no
reason to attribute it to Sappho. Mrs. E. B.
Browning thus translated it : —

SONG OF THE ROSE.

If Zeus chose us a king of the flowers in his

mirth,
He would call to the Rose and would royally

crown it,
For the Rose, ho, the Rose, is the grace of the

earth,

Is the light of the plants that are growing
upon it.

MISCELLANEOUS 169

For the Rose, ho, the Rose, is the eye of the

flowers,

Is the blush of the meadows that feel them-
selves fair —
Is the lightning of beauty that strikes through

the bowers
On pale lovers who sit in the glow unaware.

Ho, the Rose breathes of love ! Ho, the Rose

lifts the cup

To the red lips of Cypris invoked for a guest !
Ho, the Rose, having curled its sweet leaves for

the world,

Takes delight in the motion its petals keep up,
As they laugh to the wind as it laughs from the
west !

And Mr. J. A. Symonds (1883) : —

THE PRAISE OF ROSES.

If Zeus had willed it so

That o'er the flowers one flower should reign

a queen,
I know, ah well I know

The rose, the rose, that royal flower had been !
She is of earth the gem,
Of flowers the diadem ;
And with her flush
The meadows blush r

1 70 SAPPHO

Nay, she is beauty's self that brightens

In Summer, when the warm air lightens !

Her breath 's the breath of Love,

Wherewith he lures the dove

Of the fair Cyprian queen ;

Her petals are a screen

Of pink and quivering green,

For Cupid when he sleeps,

Or for mild Zephyrus, who laughs and weeps.

' Sappho loves flowers with a personal sym-
pathy,' writes Professor F. T. Palgrave. " Cretan
girls," she says, " with their soft feet dancing lay
flat the tender bloom of the grass " [fr. 54] : she
feels for the hyacinth " which shepherds on the
mountain tread under foot, and the purple
flower is on the ground " [fr. 94] : she pities the
wood-doves (apparently) as their "life grows
cold and their wings fall" before the archer'
[fr. 1 6].

147

Himerius says : —

' These gifts of yours must now be likened to
those of the leader of the Muses himself, as
Sappho and Pindar, in an ode, adorn him with

MISCELLANEOUS I/I

golden hair and lyres, and attend him with a
team of swans to Helicon while he dances with
Muses and Graces ; or as poets inspired by the
Muses crown the Bacchanal (for thus the lyre
calls him, meaning Dionysos), when Spring has
just flashed out for the first time, with Spring
flowers and ivy-clusters, and lead him, now to
the topmost heights of Caucasus and vales of
Lydia, now to the cliffs of Parnassus and the
rock of Delphi, while he leaps and gives his
female followers the note for the Evian tune.'

148

Eustathius says : —

1 There is, we see, a vagabond friendship, as
Sappho would say, KOAOV SHMOSIOV, a. public
blessing!

This appears to have been said against Rho-
dopis. Cf. fr. 138.

149

The Lexicon Seguerianum defines — •

one who has no experience of ill, notr

one who is good-natured. So Sappho uses the
word.'

172 SAPPHO

150

The Etymologicum Magnum defines —

a vine trained on long poles, and
says Sappho makes the plural ajiauo£u6e<:. So
Choeroboscus, late in the sixth century A.D.,
says ' the occurrence of the genitive ajuaua£C&o<;
[the usual form being aMand£uo<;] in Sappho is
strange.'

The Etymologicum Magnum says of
a trench for watering meadows , ' because it is
raised by a water-bucket, QUH being a mason's
instrument ' — that it is a word Sappho seems to
have used ; and Orion, about the fifth century
A.D., also explains the word similarly, and says
Sappho used it.

MISCELLANEOUS 173

152

Apollonius says : —

' And in this way metaplasms of words [i.e.,
tenses or cases formed from non-existent presents
or nominatives] arise, like epuaapjuarec [chariot-
drawing], AITO [cloths], and in Sappho TO aua,
Dawn.'

And the Etymologicum Magnum says : —

' We find napa THV auav [during the morning]
in Aeolic, for "during the day."'

153

The Etymologicum Magnum says : —

' AUOM; or H<OQ, that is, the day ; thus we read
in Aeolic. Sappho has —

noTvia auoog,
Queen Dawn?

The solemn Dawn.

FREDERICK TENNYSON.

174 SAPPHO

154

Athenaeus says : —
The pupcojuioc \baromos\ and capgiroc \sar-

b1tos\ both of which are mentioned by Sappho
andAnacreon,and theMagadis and the Triangles
and the Sambucae, are all ancient instruments.'

Athenaeus in another place, apparently more
correctly, gives the name of the first as pdpMog
\barmos\.

What these instruments precisely were is un-
known. Cf. p. 46.

155

Pollux says : —

' Sappho used the word peuboq for a woman's

dress, a kimberfron, a kind of short transparent
frock.'

MISCELLANEOUS 175

156

Phrynichus the grammarian, about 180 A.D.,
says: —

' Sappho calls a woman's dressing-case, where
she keeps her scents and such things, ppC™.'

157

Hesychius, about 370 A.D., says Sappho
called Zeus"EKTu)p, Hector, i.e. ' holding fast'

158

A Parisian MS. edited by Cramer says : —

' Among the Aeolians ? is used for 6, as when
Sappho says $dp<rrov for hctfcrrov, fordable?

176 SAPPHO

159

A Scholiast on Homer quotes ararowv, may
I lead ^ from Sappho.

1 60

Eustathius, commenting on the Iliad, quotes
the grammarian Aristophanes [about 260 B.C.]
as saying that Sappho calls a wind that is as
if twisted up and descending, a cyclone, avtjuov
KorrdpH, a wind rushing from above.

Nauck would restore the epithet to verse 2 of
fr. 42.

161

Choeroboscus says : —

'Sappho makes the accusative of
danger nivbuv.'

Another writer, in the Codex Marc., says : —
' Sappho makes the accusative Kiv

MISCELLANEOUS 177

l62

Joannes Alexandrinus, about the seventh
century A.D., says : —

'The acute accent falls either on the last
syllable or the last but one or the last but two,
but never on the last but three ; the accent of
MAbeia \_Medeia the sorceress, wife of Jason] in
Sappho is allowed by supposing the ei to form
a diphthong.'

163

An unknown author, in Antiatticista, says \

'Sappho, in her second book, calls
myrrh

164

A treatise on grammar edited by Cramer
says : —

'The genitive plural of MoCoa is Mcooacov
among the Laconians, MOIGOKOV of the Muses
in Sappho.'

M

178 SAPPHO

165

Phrynichus says : —

Nirpuv natron (carbonate of soda) is the form
1 an Aeolian would use, such as Sappho, with a
v; but,' he goes on, 'an Athenian would speli
it with a A, Airpov.'

166

A Scholiast on Homer, Iliad^ Hi. 219, says: —

' Sappho said m>\ut6pibi of much knowledge as
the dative of

167

Photius, in his Lexicon, about the ninth
century A.D., says : —

1 6dvyoc is a wood with which they dye wool
and hair yellow, which Sappho calls
&AQV Scythian wocd.

MISCELLANEOUS 179

And the Scholiast on Theocritus, Idyl ii. 88,
says : —

' 0avi/oc is a kind of wood which is also called
oKueuptov or Scythian wood, as Sappho says ;
and in this they dip fleeces and make them of a
quince-yellow, and dye their hair yellow ; among
us it is called xpuooSuAov gold-wood'

Ahrens thinks that here the Scholiast quoted
Sappho, and he thus restores the verses : —

- w - ZKU01KOV

TCJJ fJdirroiai re THpia
noteiai be naAiva
£av9io5oiai re rag

Scythian wood, in which they dip fleeces and
make, them quince-coloured, and dye their hair
vellow.

Thapsus may have been box-wood, but it is
quite uncertain.

168

The Etymologicum Magnum says : —

'The Aeolians say Tioioiv 090d\uotaiv with

what eyes . . . [using rioioi for TIGI, the dative

plural of TIQ] as Sappho does.'

ISO SAPPHO

169

Orion of Thebes, the grammarian, about 450
A.D., says : —

' In Sappho x6*"™ is xeA"VH a tortoise ' ;
which is better written xeAuva, or rather yi\wa,
as other writers imply.

170

Pollux says : —

{ Bowls with a boss in the middle are called
3a\avei6u9aAoi, circular-bottomed, from their
shape, xP00^?0^01) gold-bottomed, from the
material, like Sappho's xPuoa<3Tpara^oi. with
golden ankles?

Some few other fragments are attributed to
Sappho, but Bergk admits none as genuine.
Above is to be seen every word which he con-
sidered hers. An account of some which have
recently been brought to light is given on the
succeeding pages.

1 82 SAPPHO

ancient manuscripts have to contend. Few, at
the first glance, would guess how much could
be made out of so little.

The letters on each side of the parchment are
clearly written, punctuated, and accented. They
appear to belong to the eighth century A.D., so
that the writing is at least a thousand years old.
The actual letters are these, those which are not
decipherable with certainty being marked off by
brackets : —

(A.) 6<ooHv (B.) 6e6ujuou

UTcavuevr* en Mindjunctv

u/\cov KaoXtov (o buvanai

• AOIQ. AUTTHC T€ U
5 JU: OVeibOQ 5 aOK€VH/LlOl

oi5Haai(;. em T (a q) avriAaMTTHv

ia(v)aaaio. TO fap Aovrrpoaaiirov

u) OVOUK' OUTO) (ju

10 M (Hb 10 ... (po^

The two fragments, distinguished by Blass as A.
and B., occur, the one on the front, the other on
the back of the scrap of parchment. They were
edited by Bergk, in the fourth (posthumous)
edition of his Poetae Lyrici Gracci, 1882, vol. iii.
pp. 704, 705. Blass ascribed the verses to
Sappho, and he is still of opinion that they are
hers, from the metre, the dialect, and 'the

THE FAYUM FRAGMENTS 183

colour of the diction,' to use his own expression
in a letter to me. Indeed, every word of them
makes one feel that no poet or poetess save
Sappho could have so exquisitely combined
simplicity and beauty. Bergk, however, prints
them as of uncertain origin, fragmenta adespota
(56 A., 56 B). He agrees with Blass that they
are in the Lesbian dialect and the Sapphic
metre, but he thinks that they may have been
written by Alcaeus. Bergk's decision partly
rests upon the statement of Suidas, that Hora-
pollo, the Greek grammarian, who first taught
at Alexandria and afterwards at Constantinople,
in the reign of Theodosius, about 400 A.D.,
wrote a commentary on Alcaeus ; but he gives
no reason for believing that these Fayum manu-
scripts necessarily come from Alexandria : their
history is very uncertain. Blass thinks that the
greater fame, especially in later times, of Sappho,
strongly favours his own view. To my mind
there is little doubt that we have herein none
but her very words.

A restoration of such imperfect fragments
must needs be guess-work. Bergk has, how-
ever, attempted it in part, and he has accepted
the emendations of Blass in lines 3-5 of frag-
ment A. Biicheler, one of the editors of the
Rhtinisches Museum, has also expressed his
views with regard to some of the lines; but

184 SAPPHO

they are not endorsed by the authority of
Bergk. According to the latter distinguished
scholar, fragment A may have run thus : —

I — v — w — SOKIJLIOK; x<*Plv MOI
OUK anu&oxjHv

juev T* enrepurHQ w — w

9iAoic, AUITHC re Me KanopinrHQ
5 ei<; cu' oveiooq.

H Kev ol&Hoaic, tni T' aif'
Snupiav aoaio' TO r«P VOHUO
TWJUOV OUK OUTGO juaAaK09pov,

TOig &UXKHTUI.
IO - w )JH5' w - ww - w - w

In which case it might have had this mean-
ing:—

Thou seemest not to care to return my
favour; and indeed thou didst fly away from
famous . . . of the fair and noble . . .
to thy friends, and painest me, and easiest
reproach at me. Truly thou mayst swell, and
sate thyself with milking a goat of Scyros. For
my mood is not so soft-hearted to those soever
to whom // is disposed unfriendly . . . nor . . .
The words which are here italicised are those
which alone are extant in full in the manu-
script; the others are only plausible guesses,
though some of them are indicated by the
existence of accents and portions of letters.

THE FAYUM FRAGMENTS 185

Bergk's ingenious restoration of lines 6 and
7 is founded on a fragment of Alcaeus (fr. 1 10),
wherein Chrysippus explains al£ SKupia, a goat of
Scyros, as a proverb of those who spoil kind-
ness (rni TCOV TOQ euepreaiac avarpeirovrcov), as a goat
upsets her milking pail (erreibH noAAaKig TO afpeTa
avarpeirei H al£). Blass would, however, complete
the phrase thus : —

km T (5 re Awpot
Kapo) iav aaaio,

And with the outrage sate thy heart.

Disappointing as this is, the restoration of
fragment B. is yet more hopeless. Authorities
are agreed as to the position of the words in
the Sapphic stanza, thus : —

— w — w — ww — buvauai

w w w
5 — w — w — w, w a? Kev « MOi

— w — w — w w avTiAot/utTHV

— w — w — w KG) Aov npoaconov

10 — w — w — wv — trai) pog.

The only additions hazarded by Bergk, or
accepted by him from Blass, are given on the
left of the brackets. Bergk says that Suvawai (as
if w -- ; cf. fr. 13) is an old form of the con-

186 SAPPHO

junctive for bi foonm. He reads line 5, oic KEV K MOI,
comparing Theocritus, 29, 20, 5«; KCV epm;, 'as
long as thou lovest ' : Bergk and Blass alike
consider H as a later form of H. The words may
mean:

. . . soul . . . altogether . . . / should be
able . . . as long indeed as to me . . . to flash
back . . . fair face . . . stained over . . .
friend.

But in the absence of any context the very
meaning of the separate words is uncertain.

Bergk thinks that the fragments belong to
different poems, unless we read fragment A.
after fragment B. ; there is nothing on the
parchment to indicate sequence.

In fragment B. it will be seen that a space
occurs in each place where the last (or Adonic)
verses of each Sapphic stanza would have been,
as if they had been written more to the left in
the manuscript ; they probably therefore ranged
with the long lines, of which we have only some
of the last syllables preserved. Indenting the
shorter verses is a modern fashion ; the ancient
way was to begin each one at the same distance
from the margin.

SAPPHO TO PHAON

A TRANSLATION OF OVID*S HEROIC EPISTLE, XV.
BY ALEXANDER POPE, 1707

SAY, lovely youth that dost my heart command,
Can Phaon's eyes forget his Sappho's hand ?
Must then her name the wretched writer prove,
To thy remembrance lost as to thy love ?
Ask not the cause that I new numbers

choose,

The lute neglected and the lyric Muse :
Love taught my tears in sadder notes to flow,
And tuned my heart to elegies of woe.

I burn, I burn, as when through ripened

corn
By driving winds the spreading flames are

borne.

Phaon to Aetna's scorching fields retires,
While I consume with more than Aetna's fires.

187

188 SAPPHO TO PHAON

No more my soul a charm in music finds ,
Music has charms alone for peaceful minds :
Soft scenes of solitude no more can please ;
Love enters there, and I'm my own disease.
No more the Lesbian dames my passion move,
Once the dear objects of my guilty love : x
All other loves are lost in only thine,
Ah, youth ungrateful to a flame like mine!
Whom would not all those blooming charms

surprise,

Those heavenly looks and dear deluding eyes ?
The harp and bow would you like Phoebus bear,
A brighter Phoebus Phaon might appear .
Would you with ivy wreathe your flowing hair,
Not Bacchus' self with Phaon could compare :
Yet Phoebus loved, and Bacchus felt the flame j
One Daphne warmed and one the Cretan

dame;

Nymphs that in verse no more could rival me
Than e'en those gods contend in charms with

thee.

The Muses teach me all their softest lays,
And the wide world resounds with Sappho's

praise.

1 Line 19, 'quas non sine crimine amavi,' which
Pope translates thus, is read in many old texts ' quas
hie sine crimine amavi ' = whom here I blamelessly
loved ; and even if the former reading be adopted, it
must be remembered that crimen means ' an accusation
more often than it does ' a crime. '

SAPPHO TO PHAON 189

Though great Alcaeus more sublimely sings,
And strikes with bolder rage the sounding

strings,

No less renown attends the moving lyre
Which Venus tunes and all her Loves inspire.
To me what Nature has in charms denied
Is well by wit's more lasting flames supplied.
Though short my stature, yet my name extends
To heaven itself and earth's remotest ends :
Brown as I am, an Aethiopian dame
Inspired young Perseus with a generous flame •.
Turtles and doves of different hue unite,
And glossy jet is paired with shining white.
If to no charms thou wilt thy heart resign
But such as merit, such as equal thine,
By none, alas, by none thou canst be moved ;
Phaon alone by Phaon must be loved.
Yet once thy Sappho could thy cares employ ;
Once in her arms you centred all your joy :
No time the dear remembrance can remove,
For oh how vast a memory has love !
My music then you could for ever hear,
And all my words were music to your ear :
You stopt with kisses my enchanting tongue,
And found my kisses sweeter than my song.
In all I pleased, but most in what was best ;
And the last joy was dearer than the rest :
Then with each word, each glance, each motion

fired,

SAPPHO TO PHAON

You still enjoyed, and yet you still desired,
Till all dissolving in the trance we lay,
And in tumultuous raptures died away.

The fair Sicilians now thy soul inflame :
Why was I born, ye gods, a Lesbian dame ?
But ah, beware, Sicilian nymphs, nor boast
That wandering heart which I so lately lost ;
Nor be with all those tempting words abused :
Those tempting words were all to Sappho used.
And you that rule Sicilia's happy plains,
Have pity, Venus, on your poet's pains.

Shall fortune still in one sad tenor run
And still increase the woes so soon begun ?
Inured to sorrow from my tender years,
My parent's ashes drank my early tears :
My brother next, neglecting wealth and fame,
Ignobly burned in a destructive flame :
An infant daughter late my griefs increased,
And all a mother's cares distract my breast.
Alas, what more could Fate itself impose,
But thee, the last and greatest of my woes ?
No more my robes in waving purple flow,
Nor on my hand the sparkling diamonds glow ;
No more my locks in ringlets curled diffuse
The costly sweetness of Arabian dews ;
Nor braids of gold the varied tresses bind
That fly disordered with the wanton wind.
P'or whom should Sappho use such arts as these?

SAPPHO TO PHAON ipl

He 's gone whom only she desired to please !
Cupid's light darts my tender bosom move ;
Still is there cause for Sappho still to love ;
So from my birth the Sisters fixed my doom,
And gave to Venus all my life to come :
Or, while my Muse in melting notes complains,
My yielding heart keeps measure to my strains.
By charms like thine, which all mysoul havewon,
Who might not — ah, who would not be undone?
For those, Aurora Cephalus might scorn,
And with fresh blushes paint theconscious morn:
For those, might Cynthia lengthen Phaon's sleep,
And bid Endymion nightly tend his sheep :
Venus for those had rapt thee to the skies,
But Mars on thee might look with Venus' eyes.
O scarce a youth, yet scarce a tender boy !
O useful time for lovers to employ !
Pride of thy age, and glory of thy race,
Come to these arms and melt in this embrace !
The vows you never will return, receive ;
And take at least the love you will not give.
See, while I write, my words are lost in tears :
The less my sense, the more my love appears.

Sure 'twas not much to bid one kind adieu :
At least, to feign was never hard to you.
'Farewell, my Lesbian love,' you might have

said ;
Or coldly thus, ' Farewell, O Lesbian maid.'

192 SAPPHO TO PHAON

No tear did you, no parting kiss receive,
Nor knew I then how much I was to grieve.
No lover's gift your Sappho could confer;
And wrongs and woes were all you left with her.
No charge I gave you, and no charge could give
But this — ' Be mindful of our loves, and live.'
Now by the Nine, those powers adored by me,
And Love, the god that ever waits on thee ; —
When first I heard (from whom I hardly knew)
That you were fled and all my joys with you,
Like some sad statue, speechless, pale I stood ;
Grief chilled my breast and stopt my freezing

blood ;

No sigh to rise, no tear had power to flow,
Fixed in a stupid lethargy of woe.
But when its way the impetuous passion found,
I rend my tresses and my breasts I wound ;
I rave, then weep ; I curse, and then complain ;
Now swell to rage, now melt in tears again.
Not fiercer pangs distract the mournful dame
Whose first-born infant feeds the funeral

flame.

My scornful brother with a smile appears,
Insults my woes, and triumphs in my tears ;
His hated image ever haunts my eyes ; —
'And why this grief? thy daughter lives,' he

cries.

Stung with my love and furious with despair,
All torn my garments and my bosom bare,

SAPPHO TO PHAON 193

My woes, thy crimes, I to the world proclaim ,
Such inconsistent things are love and shame.
'Tis thou art all my care and my delight,
My daily longing and my dream by night. —

0 night, more pleasing than the brightest day,
When fancy gives what absence takes away,
And, dressed in all its visionary charms,
Restores my fair deserter to my arms !

Then round your neck in wanton wreath I

twine ;

Then you, methinks, as fondly circle mine :
A thousand tender words I hear and speak ;
A thousand melting kisses give and take :
Then fiercer joys ; I blush to mention these,
Yet, while I blush, confess how much they please.
But when with day the sweet delusions fly,
And all things wake to life and joy, but I ;
As if once more forsaken, I complain,
And close my eyes to dream of you again :
Then frantic rise ; and, like some fury, rove
Through lonely plains, and through the silent

grove,

As if the silent grove and lonely plains,
That knew my pleasures, could relieve my pains,

1 view the grotto, once the scene of love,
The rocks around, the hanging roofs above,
That charmed me more, with native moss o'er-

grown,

Than Phrygian marble or the Parian stone :
N

194 SAPPHO TO PHAON

I find the shades that veiled our joys before ;
But, Phaon gone, those shades delight no more.
Here the pressed herbs with bending tops betray
Where oft entwined in amorous folds we lay ;
I kiss that earth which once was pressed by you,
And all with tears the withering herbs bedew.
For thee the fading trees appear to mourn,
And birds defer their song till thy return :
Night shades the groves, and all in silence lie, —
All but the mournful Philomel and I :
With mournful Philomel I join my strain ;
Of Tereus she, of Phaon I complain.

A spring there is whose silver waters show,
Clear as a glass, the shining sands below :
A flowery lotus spreads its arms above,
Shades all the banks and seems itself a grove ;
Eternal greens the mossy margin grace,
Watched by the sylvan genius of the place :
Here as I lay, and swelled with tears the flood
Before my sight a watery virgin stood :
She stood and cried, — ' O you that love in vain,
Fly hence and seek the fair Leucadian main :
There stands a rock from whose impending

steep

Apollo's fane surveys the rolling deep ;
There injured lovers, leaping from above,
Their flames extinguish and forget to love.
Deucalion once with hopeless fury burned ;

SAPPHO TO PHAON 195

In vain he loved, relentless Pyrrha scorned.
But when from hence he plunged into the main,
Deucalion scorned, and Pyrrha loved in vain.
Haste, Sappho, haste, from high Leucadia throw
Thy wretched weight, nor dread the deeps

below.'
She spoke, and vanished with the voice: I

rise,

And silent tears fall trickling from my eyes.
I go, ye nymphs, those rocks and seas to prove :
How much I fear, but ah, how much I love !
I go, ye nymphs, where furious love inspires ;
Let female fears submit to female fires :
To rocks and seas I fly from Phaon's hate,
And hope from seas and rocks a milder fate.
Ye gentle gales, beneath my body blow,
And softly lay me on the waves below.
And thou, kind Love, my sinking limbs sustain,
Spread thy soft wings and waft me o'er the main,
Nor let a lover's death the guiltless flood profane.
On Phoebus' shrine my harp I '11 then bestow,
And this inscription shall be placed below: —
* Here she who sung, to him that did inspire,
Sappho to Phoebus consecrates her lyre :
What suits with Sappho, Phoebus, suits with thee;
The gift, the giver, and the god agree.'

But why, alas, relentless youth, ah, why
To distant seas must tender Sappho fly ?

196 SAPPHO TO PHAON

Thy charms than those may far more powerful

be,

And Phoebus' self is less a god to me.
Ah, canst thou doom me to the rocks and sea,
O far more faithless and more hard than they ?
Ah, canst thou rather see this tender breast
Dashed on these rocks that to thy bosom

pressed ?
This breast, which once, in vain ! you liked so

well;
Where the Loves played, and where the Muses

dwell.

Alas, the Muses now no more inspire :
Untuned my lute, and silent is my lyre :
My languid numbers have forgot to flow,
And fancy sinks beneath the weight of woe.

Ye Lesbian virgins and ye Lesbian dames,
Themes of my verse and objects of my flames,
No more your groves with my glad songs shall

ring;
No more these hands shall touch the trembling

string :

My Phaon 's fled, and I those arts resign :
(Wretch that I am, to call that Phaon mine !)
Return, fair youth, return, and bring along
Joy to my soul and vigour to my song.
Absent from thee, the poet's flame expires ;
But ah, how fiercely burn the lover's fires !

SAPPHO TO PHAON 197

Gods, can no prayers, no sighs, no numbers

move

One savage heart, or teach it how to love ?
The winds my prayers, my sighs, my numbers

bear ;

The flying winds have lost them all in air.
Or when, alas, shall more auspicious gales
To these fond eyes restore thy welcome sails ?
If you return, ah, why these long delays ?
Poor Sappho dies while careless Phaon stays.
O launch the bark, nor fear the watery plain :
Venus for thee shall smooth her native main.
O launch thy bark, secure of prosperous gales :
Cupid for thee shall spread the swelling sails.
If you will fly — (yet ah, what cause can be,
Too cruel youth, that you should fly from me ?)
If not from Phaon I must hope for ease,
Ah, let me seek it from the raging seas :
To raging seas unpitied I '11 remove ;
And either cease to live or cease to love.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

THE following list comprises most of the books and
articles in Sapphic literature which I have consulted. I
have added a few to which I have had reference, but
which I have not succeeded in seeing : many of them are
mere curiosities. I could have still further extended the
bibliography, if I had taken more on trust. I have not
generally thought it necessary to quote well-known his-
tories of Greece and Greek literature, nor such transla-
tions as throw no light upon her beyond what this list
contains.

ADDISON, JOHN : The Works of Anacreon translated into
English Verse ; with Notes explanatory and poetical.
To which are added the Odes, Fragments, and
Epigrams of Sappho. With the original Greek
placed opposite to the Translation. 8vo, London,
1735-

ADDISON, JOSEPH : Spectator, No. 223, Nov. 15, 1711
and No. 233, Nov. 27, 1711.

AHRENS, HEINRICH LUDOLF: De Graecae Linguae
Dialectis, Sapphus fragmenta, pp. 256-274 of Lib. I.
Svo, Gottingen, 1839.

AHKENS, HEINRICH LUDOLF: Conjecturen in Alcaus
und Sappho, Rheinisches Museum, 1842, pp. 388-
401.

199

200 BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Anacreontis et Sapphonis Carmina. Cum virorum doc-

torum notis et emendationibus, in usum juventutis

Academiae Salfordiensis, Com. Lancastriae. 8vo,

London, 1754.
ANDREAS, ELIAS : Anacreontis Teii antiquissimi poetae

Lyrici Odae, ab Helia Andrea Latinae factae. i6mo,

Lutetiae, 1556.
ANDREAS, ELIAS : Anacreontis, Sapphus, et Erinnae

Carmina interpretibus Henrico Stephano et Elia

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ARNOLD, EDWIN, M.A., C.S.I. : The Poets of Greece
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BAXTER, WILLIAM : see Vossius, Isaac (1695).

BAXTER, WILLIAM: Anacreontis Teii Carmina Graece e
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Iterum edidit varietatemque lectionibus cum suis
animadversionibus et Anacreontis fragmenta adjecit
Job.. Frider. Fischerus. 8vo, Leipzig, 1776.

BEAU, GABRIEL : La Grece Poetique. Anacreon —

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I2mo, Paris, 1884.
BENTLEY, RICHARD, D.D. : in Graevius' Callimajchi

Fragmenta, 8vo, Utrecht, 1697, ad. fr. 417, de

Sapphus fragm. 118.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 2OI

BERGK, THEODOR : De aliquot fragtnentis Sapphonis et

Alcaei. Rheinisches Museum fiir Philologie, 8vo,

Bonn, 1835, pp. 209-231.
BERGK, THEODOR : Anthologia Lyrica. 8vo, Leipzig,

1854, pp. 261-273 (text only).
BERGK, THEODOR : Poetae Lyrici Graeci, ed. 4, vol. 3,

pp. 82-140. 8vo, Leipzig, 1882.
Bibliotheque Universelle des Dames ; alias Bibliotheque

de Mesdemoiselles Eulalie, Felicite, Sophie, Emilie

De Marcilly. Melanges. Tom. viii. pp. 95-130.

24010, Paris, 1787.

BLAND, REV. ROBERT : see Merivale, J. H.
BLASS, FRIEDRICH, of Kiel : Zu den Griechischen

Lyrikern. Rhein. Mus., vol. xxix., 1874: Sappho,

PP- I49-I51-
BLASS, FRIEDRICH, of Kiel : Neue Fragmente . . .

der Sappho. Rhein. Mus., vol. xxxv. 1880; pp.

287-290.

BLOMFIELD, CHARLES JAMES, Bishop of London : Cam-
bridge Museum Criticum, vol. i. , pp. 1-31, 250-252,

421, 422. 8vo, 1826.

BLOMFIELD, CHARLES JAMES : see Gaisford.
BLUM, JOHANN CHRISTIAN : in Olearius' De Poetriis

Graecis. 4to, Leipzig, 1712.
BOETTICHER, K. : Zwei Hermenbildnisse der Sappho ;

with a photograph. Archaologische Zeitung, 4to,

Berlin, 1872, pp. 83-86.
BORN, FRIEDRICH GOTTLIEB, PH.D. : Anacreontis et

Sapphus [pp. 219-227] Carmina Graece recensuit

notisque illustravit ex optimis interpretibus, quibus

et suas adjecit. 8vo, Leipzig, 1789.
BOTHE, FRIDERICUS HENRICUS : Anacreontica Graece

recensuit notisque criticis instruxit. SctTupouq Aeiyava

pp. 77-81. i6mo, Leipzig, 1805.

202 BIBLIOGRAPHY

BRAUN, G. C. : Die Fragmente der Sappho, ubersetzt
von G. C. B[raun]. 8vo, Wetzlar, 1815.

BROCKHAUSEN, R. : Sappho's Lieder in deutschen
Versen nachgebildet. Lemgo, 1827.

BRUNCK, RICHARD FRANCOIS PHILIPPE : Analecta vet-
erum poetarum Graecorum : i., pp. 54-57 ; ii., p. 8.
8vo, Strassburg, 1772.

BRUNCK, RICHARD FRANC.OIS PHILIPPE : Anacreontis
Carmina: accedunt quaedam e lyricorum reliquiis
pp. 82-86. Ed. 2, I2mo, Strassburg, 1786.

BRUNCK, RICHARD FRANCOIS PHILIPPE : see Weise,
G. H. (1844).

BURGKK, EDUARD : Anacreon und andere lyrische
Dichter Griechenlands in deutschen Reimen. 32mo,
Stuttgart, 1855.

BUSTELLI, GIUSEPPE: Vita e Frammenti di Saffo de
Mitilene. Discorso e versione (prima inter a). Pp.
104. 8vo, Bologna, 1863.

CAPPONE, FRANCESCO ANTONIO : Liriche Parafrasi di
D. Francesco Antonio Cappone, Academico ozioso.
Supra tutte 1'Ode d'Anacreonte, e sopra alcune altre
Poesie di diversi Lirici Poeti Greci. Secundo la
preposta version Latina de'l'or piu celebri Traduttori.
pp. 190-200. 241110, Venice, 1670.

COMPARETTI, PROFESSOR DOMENICO : Saffo e Faone
dinanzi 'alia critica storia, in the Nuova Antologia di
Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, anno xi., seconda serie,
vol. i., fasc. ii., pp. 253-288. 8vo, Florence, Febr.
1876.

COMPARETTI, PROFESSOR DOMENICO : Sulla Epistola
Ovidiana di Saffo a Faone, studico critio. Published
by the R. Istituto di Studi Superiori pratici e di
perfezionamento in Firenze, Sezione di Fiiosofia e
Filologia, vol. ii., dispensa prima, 8vo, pp. 53,
Florence, 1876.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 2O3

COMPARETTI, PROFESSOR DOMENICO : Sappho nelle
Antiche Rappresentanze Vascolari. Published in
the Museo Italiano di Antichita Classica, pp. 41-80,
with 4 plates, 410, Firenze, 1886.

COUPIN : see Girodet de Roussy.

COURIER, P.-L. : Daphnis et Chloe, traduit par P.-L.
Courier. Suivi des Poesies d'Anacreon et de Sappho
[Odes I. and II. in French prose, pp. 45-49] tra-
duction nouvelle d'apres un Manuscrit de 1'ecole
d'Athenes. 8vo, Paris, 1878.

CRAMER, JOHN ANTONY, D.D. : Anecdota Graeca e
codd. manuscriptis Bibliothecarum Oxoniensium de-
scripsit. Frag. 95, vol. i., p. 444; frag. 158, vol.
"•> P- 325- 2 v°k' 8vo, Oxford, 1835-6.

CRAMER, J. CHR. : Diatribe chronologico-critica dp
patria Sapphus. 4to, Jena, N.D.

CRAMER, J. CHR. : Diatribe chronologico-critica de auj"
9poviojuup Sapphus et Anacreontis. 410, Jena, 1755.

DACIER, ANNE LEFEVRE l : Les Poesies d'Anacreon et
de Sapho, traduites de Grec en Fran(ois, avec des
Remarques. Les Poesies de Sapho de Lesbos, pp.
387-429. I2mo, Paris, 1681.

DACIER, ANNE LEFEVRE : Les Poesies d'Anacreon et de
Sapho traduites de Grec en Frangois, avec des Re-
marques par Mademoiselle Le Fevre, pp. 387-429,
I2mo, Lyons, 1696.

DACIER, ANNE LEFEVRE : Les poesies d'Anacreon et de
Sapho traduites de Grec en Frangois, avec des Re-
marques, par Madame Dacier. Nouvelle edition
augmentee des Notes Latines de Mr. le Fevre.
I2mo, Amsterdam, 1699.

1 Anne Lefevre, daughter of Tanneguy Lefevre (Tanaquillus
Fmber], born at Saumur about 1654, married Andre Dacier in 1683
and died at the Louvre, 1720.

204 BIBLIOGRAPHY

DACIEK, ANNE LEFEVRE : Les Poe'sies d'Anacreon et de
Sapho traduites de Grec en Frai^ois, avec des Re •
marques, par Madame Dacier. Nouvelle Edition,
augmentee des Notes Latines de Mr. le Fevre, et de
la Traduction en vers Frai^ois de Mr. de la Fosse.
8vo, Amsterdam, 1716.

DEGEN, J. F. : Anacreon und Sappho's Lieder nebst
and. lyr. Gedichten, Text und libers. Altenburg,
1787.

Die Gedichte Anakreons und der Sappho Oden aus dem
Griechischen ubersetzt, und mit Anmerkungen be-
gleitet, pp. 205-216. 8vo, Carlsruhe, 1760.

Discours sur la Poesie lyrique, avec les modeles du genre
tire's de Pindare, d'Anacreon, de Sapho [pp. 137-
140], de Malherbe, etc. 24mo, Paris, 1761.

Du Bois, EDWARD: The Wreath; composed of Se-
lections from Sappho, etc, . . . accompanied by
a prose translation, with notes. 8vo, London,
1799-

DuBOis-GoCHAN, E.-P. : La Pl&ade Grecque : Tra-
ductions contenant Les Odes et Fragments d'Ana-
cre"on, Les Poesies de Sapho, etc., pp. 71-88. 8vo,
Paris, 1873.

EASBY-SMITH, JAMES S. : The Songs of Sappho. 8vo,
pp. ix. 97, Washington, 1891.

EGERTON, THE HONOURABLE FRANCIS HENRY : A
Fragment of an Ode of Sappho, from Longinus :
also, an Ode of Sappho from Dionysius Halicarn.
Pp. 26. 8vo, Paris, 1815.

ELTON, SIR CHARLES ABRAHAM, BART. : Specimens of
the Classic Poets . . . translated into English
verse, and illustrated with biographical aud criti-
cal notices; vol. i., pp. 99-111. 8vo, London,
1814.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 205

FABER, TANAQUILLUS : Anacreontis et Sapphonis Car-
mina. Notas et Animadversiones addidit Tanaquillus
Faber ; in quibus multa Veterum emendantur.
24010, Saumur, 1670.

FABER, TANAQUILLUS: see Baxter, William (1776).

FARD, LE POETE SANS : see Ga9on, Francis.

FARNELL, GEORGE S. : Greek Lyric Poetry ; pp. 148-
167, 327-342. 8vo, London, 1891.

FAWKES, REV. FRANCIS, M.A. : The Works of Anacreon,
Sappho [pp. 169-196], Bion, Moschus, and Musaeus.
Translated into English by a Gentleman of Cam-
bridge. 1 2mo, London, 1760. Often reprinted, e.g.
1789 ; 1810 ; 1832 ; in Anderson's Poets of Great
Britain, vol. xiii., 1793 ; in Chalmers' Works of the
English Poets, vol. xx., 1810, etc.

FELTON, CORNELIUS CON WAY, LL.D. : Greece,
Ancient and Modern. Lectures delivered before the
Lowell Institute [1852-1854]. (Sappho, vol. i. pp.
171-180). 2 vols., 8vo, Boston, 1867.

FEVRE, MADEMOISELLE LE : see Dacier, Madame.
IELD, MICHAEL : Long Ago. 8vo, pp. 132, London,
1889.

FINKENSTEIN, F. L. K. : Sappho, Ode aus Aphrodita
ubers. Berlin, 1810.

FISCHER, JOH. FRIDR. : see Baxter, William (1776).

FONVIELLE, B. F. A. : Sapho, ou Le Saut de Leucate,
tragedie lyrique en trois actes. 8vo, Paris, 1816.

FOSSE, DE LA : see Dacier, Madame (1716).

FRIEDRICH : Bion, Anacreon, und Sappho. Aus d.
Griech. Ubers. Libau, 1787.

FROTHINGHAM, ELLEN : Sappho, a tragedy in five acts.
A translation from the German play by Franz
Grillparzer. l6mo, Boston, U.S.A., 1876.

206 BIBLIOGRAPHY

N, FRANCOIS : Les Odes d'Anacr^on et de Sappho
[pp. 343-354] en vers Frai^ois par le poete Sans
Fard. I2mo, Rotterdam, 1712; also Les Poe"sies
d'Anacre"on, etc., 32mo, Paris, 1754.

GA^ON, FRANCOIS : ' AvaKpfovroc THIOU jueAH. Zampouq
'Aojuara. i6mo, Paris, 1754.

GAISFORD, THOMAS, D.D. : Sapphonis Fragmenta,
edited by Charles James Blomfield, and reprinted
from the Cambridge Museum Criticum, fasc. i., in
Gaisford's Poetae Minores Graeci, vol. iii., pp.
289-314. 8vo, Leipzig, 1823.

GERHARD, W. : Anacreon und Sappho. Freie Nach-
bildung fiir den deutschen Gesang. Leipzig, 1847.

GILES, J. A. : see Hainebach, J. H.

GILLIVER : Anacreontis carmina, etc. . . . et poetriae
Sapphus quae supersunt. London, 1733.

GIRODET DE ROUSSY, ANNE Louis : Sappho, Bion,
Moschus, Recueil de Compositions dessine"es par
Girodet, et gravees par M. Chatillon, son eleve, avec
la traduction en vers par Girodet, et une Notice sur
la Vie et les CEuvres de Sappho, par Coupin. 410,
Paris, 1829.

GLEIM, J. W. L. : Die Oden Anakreons in reimlosen
Versen. Nebst einigen andern Gedichten. Die 2
Oden der Dichterin Sappho, pp. 45-48. 8vo,
Frankfort and Leipzig, 1746.

GOLDMANN, C. A. F. : Bion, nebst einigen Gedichten
der Sappho, der Erinna, und des Mimnermus iibers.
Soest, 1808.

GRAINVILLE, J. B. : LeshymnesdeSapho, nouvellement
decouvertes et traduites pour la premiere fois en
fran9ois, avec des notes et une version italienne. 8vo,
Paris, 1796.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 2O?

GRAUX, CHARLES : Revue de Philologie, 1880, pp. 81, ff.

Greek Authoresses, an anonymous article in the Edin-
burgh Review, vol. lv., No. cix., April, 1832, pp.
182-208.

GREENE, E. B. : The Works of Anacreon and Sappho
[pp. 127-169] . . . illustrated by observations on
their lives and writings, explanatory notes from
established commentators, and additional remarks
by the Editor ; with the Classic, an introductory
Poem. 8vo, London, 1768.

GRILLPARZER, FRANZ : see Frothingham.

GROSSET : see Marcelot et Grosset.

GUNTHER WAHT, F. L. : Anacreon und Sappho, Lieder
der Liebe aus dem Griech. Erfurt, 1783.

GYRALDUS, LILIUS GREG. : see Stephanus, H. (1566,
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HAINEBACH, J. H. : Specimen Scriptorum Graecorum
minorum, quorum reliquias, fere omnium melioris
notae, ex editionibus variis excerptas ab J. A. Giles
recognoscet et supplebit J. H. Hainebach. 8vo,
Frankfort, 1834.

HARLES [alias Harless], GOTTLIEB CHRISTOPHER : An-
thologia Graeca Poetica, pp. 239-249. 8vo, Baruthi,
1792.

HARRISON, FREDERIC : The New Calendar of Great
Men, pp. 46, 47. 8vo, London, 1892. »

HARTEL, W. : Die Sappho und die Sappho-Sage, in the
Oesterr. Wochenschrift f. Wissenschaft und Kunst
v. W. Bucher, N. F., 1872.

HARTUNG, J. A. : Die Griechischen Lyriker, vol. vi.,
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HAUTEROCHE, ALLIER DE : Notizie intorno a Safifo de
Ereso. Paris, 1822.

208 BIBLIOGRAPHY

HELLER, H. J. : Carmen Sapphus Secundum, in Philo-

logus, pp. 431-437, 8vo, Gottingen, 1856. (Heller

reads the last line thus : nav be TOAjuaTtOv em T«

'ratTHTa, i.e. amicae causa, ad amicam mihi con-

ciliandam).
HERMANN, G. : Bermerkungen liber Homer und die Frag-

mente der Sappho, in his Works, vol. vi. , pp. 70-

141- 1835.
HIGGINSON, THOMAS WBNTWORTH, COLONEL: Sappho,

an article published in the Atlantic Monthly for

1871, and reprinted in Atlantic Essays, pp. 299-324.

Boston, 1882.
HOFFMANN, S. F. W. : Lexicon Bibliographicum, sive

Index Editionum et Interpretationum Scriptorum

Graecorum, turn sacrorum turn profanorum. V. sub

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HOSKEN, JAMES DRYDEN, ' the Postman-Poet ' : Phaon

and Sappho, a Play. 8vo, Penzance, 1891.
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gische Zeitung, 8vo, Berlin, 1872, pp. 86-87 f

1873, pp. 46, 47.
HUDSON, JOHN, D.D. : Dionysius Longinus de Sub-

limitate, cum praefationibus, notis, et variis lec-

tionibus. 8vo, Oxford, 1710.
IMPERIALS, G. V. : see Verri, A.
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Berlin, 1852.
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Prenzlau, 1827.
KOCK, THEODOR ; Alkaos und Sappho, pp. 22-98.

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KOECHLY, H. : Uber Sappho, mit RUcksicht auf die

gesellschaftliche Stellung der Frauen bei den

Griechen : Academische Vortrage, Zurich, 1859,

pp. 155-277, 406-412.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 2O9

LANGAPETRAEUS=Longepierre, q.v.

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LEWIS, MRS. ESTELLE : Sappho : a Tragedy in five
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LILLY, JOHN, ' the Euphuist ' : Sapho and Phao, played
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LONGEPIERRE, MR. DE : Les Oeuvres d'Anacreon et de
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LUNIAK (LuSAK), JOHN, Phil. Mag. : Quaestiones
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LOT, C. BREGHOT DU : Poesies de Sapho, traduites en
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LUZAN, DON IGNACIO DE : Las dos Odas de Safo, in
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O

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PAGNINI, G. M. : Le Poesie di Anacreonte, di Saffo
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PELAYO, MENENDEZ Y: Translation in Spanish verse
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PHILIPS, AMBROSE : The Works of Anacreon and Sappho
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PILENEJO, ERITISCO: pseudonym of G. M. Pagnini,
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IN MEMORIAM

MR. H. T. WHARTON — known to book-lovers
as 'Sappho Wharton* — died on August 22,
1895, after a lingering illness due to influenza,
at his residence in West Hampstead; and he
lies buried in the neighbouring cemetery of
Fortune Green.

Henry Thornton Wharton was born in 1846,
at Mitcham, in Surrey, of which parish his
father was then vicar. His mother, who sur-
vives him, was a Courtenay, a cousin of the
Earl of Devon. His elder brother, the author
of Etyma Graeca and Etyma Latina, is a Fellow
of Jesus College, Oxford ; a younger brother
shares his taste for ornithology. He was
educated as a day-boy at the Charterhouse, in
its old Smithfield days ; and after spending a
short time in the classical department of King's
College, he went up to Oxford in 1867, as a
commoner of Wadham. That college had no
more enthusiastic alumnus, and he will be
greatly missed, both at the Gaudy and at the

219

22O IN MEMORIAM

annual dinner in London. He graduated in
1871 with honours in natural science, and then
joined the medical school at University College.
On qualifying as M.R.C.S. in 1875, he settled
down to general practice in West Hampstead.
He never earned a large income ; but his de-
votion to ail his patients, and in particular his
generosity to the poor, will cause his memory
to be long held in honour.

The general public first heard of him in 1885,
when he brought out his Sappho — memoir, text,
selected renderings, and a literal translation
(David Stott). The book met with an imme-
diate success, partly because it supplied a want,
and partly from the attractive form in which it
was produced. A second edition was called
for within two years ; and this very summer a
third, with additions, has been published by
Mr. John Lane. The author spared no pains
to make the volume worthy of its subject.
Merely as a specimen of book-making, it has few
rivals. The Royal Press of Berlin lent a fount
of Greek type, which had never before been used
in this country. Prof. Blass, of Kiel, gave his
assistance in determining the obscure text of
the fragments. Mr. John Addington Symonds
contributed special metrical versions of all the
longer pieces. Mr. John Cother Webb engraved
for frontispiece the head of Sappho in Mr. Alma

IN MEMORIAM 221

Tadema's famous picture, the original of which
has since gone to America. Of Mr. Wharton's
own work we must be content to praise the
memoir, marked by good sense as well as
erudition ; and the bibliography, which includes
the latest programs of Russian universities.
The result is one of the rare books that give
fresh life to an ancient author, and beget other
good books, such, in this case, as Michael Field's
Long Ago. It appeals alike to the scholar,
the bibliophile, and the general public ; and by
it the author's name will be preserved, along
with that of the immortal poetess, when far
more notorious writers of the day are forgotten.
But Mr. Wharton was by no means a man
of one book. Though he had got together a
choice collection of English literature, his real
interest lay in natural history. It would be
difficult, indeed, to say to which of its branches
he was most devoted. His knowledge of
ornithology was based upon observation as
much as upon books. His eye and ear were
both highly trained, and he always made his
learning subservient to nature. So, again,
with regard to botany. While he did not
despise the most technical details, it was his
delight to accompany gatherings of autumn
fungus-hunters, and to point out what was
wholesome and what poisonous. He was one

222 IN MEMORIAM

of the joint compilers of the official List of
British Birds published by the B. O. U. (1883),
his special task being to supervise and elucidate
the Latin nomenclature; and he contributed a
chapter on the local flora to a work entitled
Hampstead Hill (1889).

So much, however, summarises only what
Harry Wharton did, not what he was. His
was one of the bounteous natures that radiate
happiness wherever they go. Men, women,
and children alike brightened in his genial
presence. He led a blameless and a beneficent
life. He never made an enemy and he never
lost a friend. He ought to have been a con-
temporary of Charles Lamb. It is hard to
realise — especially for one who has known and
loved him for nearly thirty years — that we shall
never see again that os honestum, never hear
again that ringing laugh.

' God be with his soul ! A' was a merry man.'

J. S. COTTON.
1895.

Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty
at the Edinburgh Univerity Press

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